CNN News:暴雨成災(zāi)雪上加霜 數(shù)萬居民撤離加沙

Welcome to your Tuesday edition of CNN STUDENTNEWS.

Hope you're all doing well as the year winds downand exam crop up.

We're starting today in Gaza.

You've heard us mention this region of the Middle East before, or often in the contest of theIsraeli-Palestinian conflict.

But further complicating life in the area, severe flooding.

It started with a very rare snowstorm,the first there in decades, but then rain and rising waters knocked out power.

That caused problems for medical care and city services, delays in deliveries of much neededfuel.

And that's just its toll on infrastructure.

In a place already blighted and bleak from years of war and a lack of resources, a winter stormin pushing people to the brink.

In some of the tightly women neighborhoods, several days of torrential rain have created riverswhere there should be roads.

The Hamas government says more than 5,000 people have been forced from their homes inGaza.

Ummiyad and her six children fled to an overcrowded shelter.

They had no choice but to abandon the room they all slept in and leave behind everything theyhad.

She said, she came here because her house was destroyed.

The roof fell in, and water soaked the mattresses and blankets.

There was no way to salvage things and dry out.

A lone power plant was shut off last month causing 12 hour blackouts due to a fuel shortage.

On a tour of the destruction brought by the winter storm a Hamas minister gets an earful ashe approaches the farmer.

"I might freeze to death," the farmer yells.

The farmer is distraught because the storm has flooded his field and frozen his crops, whichmeans he will suffer a long, difficult year, not just a hard winter.

He says he's totally ruined, there is nothing left, not the greenhouse nor his field of peas,carrots, cucumbers and potatoes.

It's all completely destroyed, he tells us.

Here, the blame game is an endless stream of slights Hamas lays at Israel's feet.

But the blame goes both ways.

An Israeli-Egyptian blockade that Israel says then placed to curb the flow of weapons intoGaza is also slowing down the import of things such as fuel and building supplies.

On Friday, Israel opened the main crossing to allow in fuel and water pumps to help alleviatethe flooding.

According to the U.N. agency there, the damage from the flood has created disastrous zonesin parts of Gaza, in the place that is always lacking more help can't come soon enough.