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Powerful cold-season gusts caused walls to collapse onto flimsy tents housing people uprooted by conflict in Gaza, killing at least 4 people. These deaths highlights the perilous situation that continue after over 24 months of devastating airstrikes and severe shortages of humanitarian assistance.

Truce Offers No Respite from Severe Weather

Although a truce has been active from last fall, aid groups report that Palestinians do not have the adequate shelter necessary to survive frequent winter storms.

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

Separately, the Gaza health ministry stated on Tuesday that a 12-month-old infant died of hypothermia during the night.

"International actors has enabled us to witness loss of life in all its forms," said Bassel Hamouda after the burial. "While it is correct the shelling may have paused for now, but we have seen all imaginable reasons of fatality in the world in the Gaza Strip."

Relatives Crushed in Tent Collapse

According to the medical center, three people of a single family — elderly Mohamed Hamouda, his teenage relative, and his daughter-in-law — were killed when an 26-foot high wall fell on top of their dwelling in a area near the sea of the city. At least five others were injured in the incident.

Family members on Tuesday began removing the rubble that had entombed their loved ones and reconstructing the tent shelters for survivors.

Humanitarian Efforts and Continuing Crisis

United Nations agencies and its humanitarian partners were handing out tents, plastic sheeting, warm covers and clothing as well as food and hygiene supplies throughout Gaza, said the relevant UN coordination body.

The majority of Palestinians live in makeshift tents because their houses were turned into rubble during the war. Humanitarian organizations contend not enough shelter materials are entering Gaza under the truce.

Casualty Figures After the Truce

Local health authorities, part of the administration, says more than 440 individuals have been fatally shot by Israeli fire and their bodies brought to hospitals since the truce began. The ministry keeps detailed casualty data that are considered largely accurate by UN agencies and outside analysts.

James Elder, representing the UN children’s agency Unicef, stated on that day that no fewer than 100 children under the age of 18 – sixty males and forty girls – had been lost their lives after the ceasefire began because of military operations, including unmanned aerial vehicle attacks, airstrikes, tank shelling and employment of bullets. These numbers, he explained, represented incidents where enough details had been gathered to warrant documentation, but the overall count is expected to be greater. He noted that hundreds of minors had been wounded.

"Although 'explosions and shootings have slowed' under the ceasefire, they have not ceased," Elder informed journalists at a UN briefing in Geneva by video from the Strip. "Therefore what the world now terms calm would be considered a catastrophe anywhere else," he concluded.

Third Winter of Hardship

Gaza’s population of more than 2 million individuals has been fighting to keep the freezing temperatures and bad weather away while enduring shortages of assistance and a lack of sturdier temporary housing, which is urgently needed during the colder season. This marks the third winter after the war involving the state and Hamas started on 7 October 2023, when fighters stormed into Israeli territory and murdered approximately twelve hundred individuals and took hostage two hundred and fifty-one more into Gaza.

Gaza’s health ministry reports more than 71,400 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory offensive.