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Strong cold-season gusts brought walls down onto fragile shelters housing people displaced by war in Gaza, claiming the lives of no fewer than 4 people. These deaths underscores the dangerous living conditions that persist after more than 24 months of intense airstrikes and critical shortages of aid.

Ceasefire Offers Little Respite from Harsh Elements

While a ceasefire has been in effect since October, aid groups report that residents do not have the adequate housing required to withstand recurring winter storms.

Officials at Gaza City's largest medical facility, which took in the victims, said on this week that the dead include two women, a girl, and a man.

Separately, the local health authority announced on the same day that a 12-month-old infant died of hypothermia overnight.

"International actors has enabled us to experience death in every possible way," stated a family member following the burial. "While it is correct the bombing may have paused for now, but we have witnessed all imaginable reasons of death in the world in the Gaza Strip."

Family Crushed in Tent Collapse

According to the medical center, 3 members of a one family — elderly a man, his teenage granddaughter, and his daughter-in-law — were fatally injured when an 26-foot high wall fell on top of their dwelling in a area near the sea of the city. At least 5 others were injured in the incident.

Their relatives on that day began clearing the debris that had entombed their family and rebuilding the temporary homes for survivors.

Humanitarian Efforts and Continuing Emergency

United Nations agencies and its aid organization allies were distributing tents, tarps, warm covers and clothes as well as food and hygiene supplies across Gaza, stated the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs.

The majority of Palestinians reside in improvised tents because their homes were reduced to rubble over the course of the hostilities. Humanitarian organizations contend an insufficient amount of shelter materials are entering Gaza under the truce.

Fatality Numbers After the Truce

Local health authorities, which is part of the Hamas-run government, reports over four hundred and forty individuals have been fatally shot by Israeli fire and their bodies taken to hospitals after the truce began. The authority keeps detailed casualty data that are seen as generally reliable by international bodies and outside analysts.

James Elder, representing the UN children’s agency Unicef, said on Tuesday that no fewer than one hundred minors below eighteen years old – 60 boys and forty girls – had been lost their lives since the truce began because of military operations, including unmanned aerial vehicle attacks, air raids, artillery fire and employment of bullets. Those figures, he explained, reflected incidents where sufficient information had been compiled to warrant recording, but the total toll is expected to be higher. He noted that many hundreds of children had been injured.

"Although 'explosions and gunfire have slowed' during the truce, they have not stopped," Elder informed reporters at a press conference in Geneva by video from Gaza City. "So what the world now calls quiet would be viewed as a crisis in any other place," he said.

Another Cold Season of Struggle

Gaza’s residents of more than 2 million people has been struggling to fend off the freezing temperatures and bad weather at bay while facing lack of humanitarian aid and a lack of more substantial temporary housing, which is badly needed during the colder season. It’s the third winter after the conflict involving Israel and Hamas began on 7 October 2023, when militants attacked Israeli territory and killed around twelve hundred people and abducted two hundred and fifty-one others into Gaza.

Gaza’s health ministry says over 71,400 people have been fatally injured in the subsequent military campaign.