Guest blogger Eileen Shields-West highlights the overlooked matter of shelter amid conflict and displacement in Gaza, Chad, and Syria, and calls for greater action to tackle the urgent shelter requirements of affected populations.

I’ve got shelter on my mind. Why?

The headlines are unbelievable, unbearable, and unrelenting.  “Starvation stalks children of northern Gaza.” “A Quarter of Gaza’s Population Is One Step from Famine…”  The numbness of numbers. Whose watch is it anyway? It is all of ours. Yet, we are so helpless in this rage of war.

And starvation and famine are only half of it. Shelter stands there in the shadows, rarely given the headlines it deserves, but the cause of so much more misery for these same food-starved populations.

Just imagine Rafah, in Southern Gaza. Israel has identified Rafah as the next target in its military offensive against Hamas. The town is normally home to 280,000 people. But its population has swelled to over 1.5 million – roughly three quarters of Gaza’s population – as people flee fighting elsewhere. Sprawling tent camps now dot the city, emanating out from the wider urban Rafah refugee camp – one of eight camps built for families during the war surrounding the creation of Israel in 1948. So, what you have now is a new displacement crisis on top of an old, protracted one. The results are catastrophic.

At a recent Georgetown University forum on shelter that I convened for students and faculty with the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM), we heard from several practitioners in the field. We caught up with Alison Ely, chair of the United Nations (UN) Shelter Cluster in Palestine, who was in London, having returned for a few days from Rafah. She said that shelter was still in an “emerging place, so it is really not dignified or adequate.”

She told us that people are self-settling anywhere. Pitching tents on roundabouts, in the middle of central intersections or laying a bit of timber against a wall with a tarpaulin hanging over it. Some are in UNRWA shelters with one family per room. Others in informally managed sprawling tent cities that have little to no services, such as latrines and potable water sources. Ely rattles off the Cluster’s “best” estimates: 650,000 to 1.2 million people will have no home to return to because 62% of housing in Gaza has been destroyed or severely damaged.

“If Rafah is going to be the next target,” says Ely, “these people have no place else to go, and even if they do move far up north where there is no shelter because the shelter has been destroyed, the shelter agencies can’t get there to support them because there is no access.”

Time after time, the international community is failing to meet basic, much less “dignified,” shelter needs. Brian Kelly with IOM calls shelter “the orphan of response.” Why is that? “Because it does not fit anywhere,” Kelly says. “UNICEF is lucky. They have education. You go to a country and there is a Ministry of Education. You are the World Bank. You are talking about money. There is a Ministry of Finance. There ain’t no Ministry of Shelter. So, you have this mandate gap.”

Let’s look at the consequences in Chad and Northwest Syria. Chad is engulfed in a horrific displacement crisis. Nearly 12 months of fighting between the Sudanese military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have displaced as many as 10 million people with more than 700,000 refugees crossing into neighboring Chad.

From Eastern Chad, Alfateh Tarbosh, with I-ACT tells us, “The situation is really catastrophic. You die by lack of food, and, also, the plastic sheets that are being given are not sufficient. Some people can get them. Others cannot. They can only get land. ‘Here is the land – do whatever you can’…You are a refugee. You are already suffering, and you also have to build a shelter for yourself.” The plastic sheet “is the first gift – no more, no less,” notes Tarbosh. “Nothing will be given at all after that.”

In Northwest (NW) Syria, the situation is also dire. The 13-year, ongoing civil war displaced millions to this rebel enclave. A little over a year ago, on the morning of February 6, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit the same area. Many buildings were destroyed or became unstable and still are. Then in January of this year, the floods came. Tents became the default.

“The conditions in these camps are horrible,” says Hazem Rihawi who fled from Aleppo in 2016 and now is senior advocacy officer with The White Helmets. He shows pictures of deeply rutted mud roads, flood waters seeping under wind-swept tents, and children peering out with no place to go or play.

We hear from Abdullah Sumani, an IDP (internally displaced person) from Damascus since 2018: “We started with a tent of tarps on pebbles that was really cold. The next year we got a grant and were able to change to a cement floor. In the third year, we were able to build walls but still the roof was a tarp. It was a joyous moment because finally we had some privacy. The lack of privacy is the worst thing for us in the camps.”

Rihawi notes that Molham, a non-profit, Syrian-led group working on dignified shelter options, has adopted the motto “Until the last tent.” Says Rihawi, “For us, tents have become the symbol of a longer crisis, and we want to tear them down. All of us want better, stable housing for the people. And even if we fix shelter issues temporarily, our thing is that we want people to return home, to their homes.” That would require a political solution in NW Syria, Sudan, and, of course, Gaza. But, in the meantime, more attention must be paid to shelter, and that is just not happening now.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not reflect those of the International Development LSE blog or the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Featured image: Grieving families sit around the rubble of their former homes waiting for rescue crew to remove their loved ones from the debris after the February 2023 earthquake in Turkey and Syria. Source: www.sendrelief.org.