A powerful storm system is bearing down on Israel and the Gaza Strip, with forecasters warning that more than 100 millimetres of rain will fall across wide areas when the system peaks on Saturday morning, bringing flooded roads and flash floods in the desert wadis. Israel's Meteorological Service, a division of the Transportation and Road Safety Ministry, has issued an orange warning for flooding that runs until 10 p.m. on Saturday, covering the Carmel region, the northern, central and southern coastal areas and the Judean Foothills, The Jerusalem Post reported on Friday night. A separate yellow warning for flash floods covers the northern Judean Desert and the Dead Sea area over the same period, and an orange warning for dangerous swimming conditions is in force in the Mediterranean, with significant wave heights of 1.2 to 1.9 metres expected to keep building.

Source: Israel Meteorological Service via The Jerusalem Post

By Friday evening the heaviest rain had not yet arrived on the coast. Ynet reported that rainfall along large parts of Israel's coastline remained relatively light through Friday: the highest total of the day was 13 millimetres at Mavo Hama in the southern Golan Heights, Ashdod recorded 10 millimetres, and Jerusalem and Haifa each recorded four millimetres, while the Tel Aviv metropolitan area stayed completely dry. Forecasters described that as temporary — the main body of the system is due late Friday night and into Saturday morning, when several places along the coast could take tens of millimetres of rain within a few hours and accumulated totals are forecast to exceed 100 millimetres along the coastal plain, with a genuine risk of significant urban flooding from the Tel Aviv metropolitan area south towards Ashkelon.

Source: Ynet via Global 1 News

In Gaza, 950,000 people live where the water will fall

The same storm is aimed at the Gaza Strip, where the numbers are of a different order. The UN humanitarian office (OCHA) reported on 15 October that approximately 950,000 displaced Palestinians were living in locations exposed to moderate or high flood risk, including more than 400,000 in places classified as highly vulnerable. Around 44,000 people are sheltering in more than 2,300 structurally unsafe buildings that could partially collapse under severe weather, and 294,250 families require shelter assistance ahead of the rainy season. Gaza's government media office said in August that more than 2.15 million displaced Palestinians are living across the enclave, including roughly 867,000 in deteriorating tents and more than one million in shelter centres, while Gaza's Winter Emergency Committee has counted about 200,000 worn-out tents still housing hundreds of thousands of people.

Source: UN OCHA figures via Global 1 News

Gaza's Civil Defence warned on Thursday that heavy rainfall and strong winds expected from Friday could endanger displaced Palestinians living in tents and temporary shelters, as well as families staying in damaged buildings at risk of collapse, Anadolu Agency reported. The directorate urged residents to firmly secure plastic coverings and tent pegs, build earthen barriers around tents, dig channels to drain rainwater and keep belongings elevated above ground level, and warned people not to remain inside severely damaged buildings or pitch tents beside cracked walls. In Khan Younis, municipal spokesman Saeb Lakkan told Anadolu the approaching storm 'is dangerous and threatens to flood thousands of tents along the coastline and damage large areas inside the city', citing collapsed sewage networks and rainwater retention ponds filled to levels that pose a threat to residents. Lakkan said that since the ceasefire took effect on October 10, municipal authorities had received only 16,000 litres of diesel — enough to operate for just three days.

Source: Anadolu Agency

The people who would normally answer a flood call have largely lost the tools to do it. Roughly 70 per cent of municipalities' primary operational equipment and 90 per cent of Civil Defence rescue equipment have been destroyed, according to the Winter Emergency Committee, leaving only a handful of ageing vacuum tankers and a limited number of portable water pumps. The committee has identified about 7,800 tents in particularly hazardous places — dry riverbeds, rainwater collection ponds and exposed coastal ground — that it says need urgent relocation, along with roughly 2,000 cracked buildings at risk of collapse, and field surveys reported this week found that more than 162,000 of approximately 270,000 displacement tents are severely damaged or unusable. Available winter supplies are estimated to cover about 18 per cent of the families assessed as needing them.

Source: Winter Emergency Committee figures via Global 1 News

Israel reinforces emergency services; Lebanon also in the storm's path

In Israel, police have asked the public to avoid non-essential travel over the weekend, to stay away from wadi beds and flood channels, and to keep out of basements, underground car parks and lifts during heavy downpours. Israel Fire and Rescue Services said its 102 emergency call centres would be significantly reinforced, with crews deployed in the field, and its warning was blunt: 'Do not cross a flooded road, whether on foot or by vehicle — this is a real life-threatening danger.' The storm is also arriving during a scheduled engineering shutdown on the Ayalon Highway (Route 20), the country's busiest road, which closes completely again from 11 p.m. on Saturday until 5 a.m. on Sunday, with Israel Railways running a split schedule and free shuttle buses bridging the gaps. Israel has a recent measure of what this much water does: in November 2025, heavy rain caused widespread flooding, forced road closures and led to twelve people being rescued from vehicles, eight of them in Ashkelon, where at least 70 millimetres fell.

Source: Israel Police / Fire and Rescue Services via Global 1 News

Lebanon is on the same map. Its Directorate of Environment and Meteorology describes a low-pressure system centred over the Black Sea pushing unstable and rainy weather across Lebanon and the eastern Mediterranean basin until Sunday midday: Saturday is forecast as cloudy with fog over the highlands, temperatures below their seasonal averages, and scattered rain that will at times be heavy, accompanied by thunderstorms and active winds, with rising sea waves, before the weather gradually stabilises by Sunday evening. In Zahle, the municipality said on Thursday it had spent a week clearing the last storm's damage — gravel and dust swept onto roads by floods, culverts and drainage channels cleared of sediment and flood-damaged sidewalks repaired.

Source: Lebanon Directorate of Environment and Meteorology via Global 1 News

The storm lands on a shelter crisis that aid agencies were already flagging this week, as UNRWA warned that 18 of Gaza's emergency shelters are unsafe for winter. Read: UNRWA warns 18 Gaza shelters unsafe as winter nears