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Powerful cold-season gusts caused walls to collapse onto flimsy shelters housing people displaced by war in Gaza, claiming the lives of no fewer than 4 people. These deaths underscores the perilous situation that continue after more than 24 months of devastating bombardment and severe lack of humanitarian assistance.

Ceasefire Provides No Respite from Severe Weather

Although a truce has been active since October, humanitarian organizations state that Palestinians do not have the adequate housing necessary to survive recurring winter storms.

Medical staff at Gaza City's largest medical facility, which took in the bodies, said on this week that the dead include a pair of adult females, a young female, and a male adult.

In a separate incident, the local health authority announced on Tuesday that a 12-month-old infant died of hypothermia overnight.

"International actors has enabled us to witness death in every possible way," stated Bassel Hamouda following the funeral. "It’s true 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 Shelter Collapse

According to the medical center, 3 people of a single family — 72-year-old Mohamed Hamouda, his teenage relative, and his son's wife — were killed when an eight-metre tall wall collapsed onto their tent in a area near the sea of Gaza City. No fewer than five additional people were hurt in the incident.

Family members on that day began clearing the debris that had buried their loved ones and rebuilding the temporary homes for those who remained.

Humanitarian Distribution and Ongoing Crisis

United Nations agencies and its aid organization allies were handing out tents, tarps, warm covers and clothing as well as nutrition and sanitation items across Gaza, said the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs.

The majority of the population live in makeshift tents since their houses were turned into rubble during the hostilities. Humanitarian organizations say an insufficient amount of shelter materials are entering Gaza during the truce.

Casualty Numbers After the Truce

The Gaza health ministry, part of the administration, reports over 440 individuals have been fatally shot by gunfire and their remains brought to hospitals after the ceasefire went into effect. The authority maintains comprehensive fatality data that are considered generally reliable by UN agencies and independent experts.

A spokesperson for UNICEF, spokesperson for the UN children’s agency Unicef, said on Tuesday that no fewer than one hundred minors under the age of 18 – 60 males and 40 females – had been lost their lives since the truce began due to military operations, such as unmanned aerial vehicle attacks, air raids, tank shelling and employment of live ammunition. These numbers, he said, represented cases where enough details had been gathered to justify recording, but the total toll is expected to be higher. He noted that many hundreds of minors had been wounded.

"Although 'explosions and gunfire have slowed' under the truce, they have not stopped," Elder informed reporters at a UN briefing in Geneva by video link from the Strip. "So what the international community now calls quiet would be considered a crisis anywhere else," he said.

Another Cold Season of Struggle

Gaza’s population of over 2 million individuals has been struggling to keep the cold weather and storms at bay while facing shortages of assistance and a absence of more substantial transitional shelter, which is badly needed throughout the winter months. This marks the third winter after the conflict involving Israel and Hamas began on a date in late 2023, when fighters stormed into southern Israel and murdered around twelve hundred individuals and abducted two hundred and fifty-one others into Gaza.

Gaza’s health ministry reports more than seventy-one thousand four hundred people have been fatally injured in the subsequent retaliatory offensive.