River discharge to the sea is a central outcome of climatic conditions, and therefore its proxies are of particular value for environmental and climatic reconstructions. Enhanced Ba/Ca ratios in CaCO3 skeletons (e.g. coral, calcareous algae, foraminifera) were shown to record flood occurrences. Use of Ba/Ca in benthic foraminifera is more recent and of particular interest as river discharge proxies owing to their global distribution. However, the in-situ relation between individual floods and Ba/Ca ratios in coastal, benthic foraminiferal are so far missing. In this study we measured Ba/Ca ratios of live benthic foraminifera multi-year collections from the Gulf of Aqaba-Eilat, where ephemeral rivers flooding is rare (mostly <1 y-1) and brief. Relative to areas with regularly flowing river systems, these conditions enable better correlation between specific events and their impact on the foraminifera living there. Higher Ba/Ca values in foraminifera were linked to the occurrence of floods within five months of their collection. These findings suggest that the Ba/Ca values in foraminifera reflect not only the direct influence of the flood, but prolongued changes in the porewater. This finding has the potential to quantitatively assess past frequency of desert floods and their related climatic conditions.