🔗 Share this article

Strong cold-season gusts caused walls to collapse upon fragile shelters housing people displaced by conflict in Gaza, killing no fewer than four people. These deaths underscores the dangerous living conditions that continue after over two years of devastating airstrikes and severe shortages of humanitarian assistance.

Truce Offers Little Relief from Severe Weather

While a ceasefire has been active since last fall, aid groups state that residents broadly lack the adequate shelter necessary to survive frequent winter storms.

Medical staff at Shifa hospital, which received the victims, reported on Tuesday that the dead include two women, a girl, and a male adult.

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

"International actors has enabled us to experience loss of life in all its forms," stated a family member after the burial. "It’s true the bombing may have paused for now, but we have witnessed all imaginable reasons of fatality in the world in the Gaza Strip."

Relatives Crushed in Tent Collapse

According to the medical center, three members of a one household — elderly Mohamed Hamouda, his 15-year-old granddaughter, and his daughter-in-law — were fatally injured when an eight-metre tall wall fell on top of their tent in a coastal area of Gaza City. At least five additional people were injured in the event.

Family members on that day began removing the debris that had entombed their family and rebuilding the tent shelters for those who remained.

Humanitarian Distribution and Ongoing Emergency

United Nations agencies and its humanitarian partners were distributing shelter kits, tarps, blankets and clothes as well as food and hygiene supplies throughout Gaza, stated the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs.

Most of Palestinians live in makeshift shelters since their homes were turned into rubble during the war. Aid groups contend an insufficient amount of shelter materials are reaching Gaza during the truce.

Fatality Numbers Since the Ceasefire

Local health authorities, part of the Hamas-run government, reports over 440 people have been fatally shot by gunfire and their remains taken to hospitals after the truce began. The ministry keeps detailed fatality data that are seen as generally reliable by UN agencies and outside analysts.

James Elder, spokesperson for the UN children's fund, said on that day that no fewer than 100 children below eighteen years old – sixty males and forty girls – had been killed since the ceasefire started because of military operations, such as unmanned aerial vehicle attacks, airstrikes, artillery fire and use of live ammunition. Those figures, he said, represented cases where sufficient information had been gathered to justify documentation, but the total toll is believed to be greater. He added that hundreds of minors had been wounded.

"While 'explosions and shootings have slowed' under the truce, they have not ceased," Elder told reporters at a UN briefing in Geneva by video link from Gaza City. "Therefore what the world now calls calm would be viewed as a crisis anywhere else," he concluded.

Third Cold Season of Struggle

Gaza’s residents of over 2 million individuals has been struggling to fend off the freezing temperatures and bad weather at bay while enduring lack of assistance and a absence of more substantial temporary housing, which is badly required throughout the colder season. It’s the third cold season since the conflict between the state and Hamas began on 7 October 2023, when militants attacked southern Israel and killed around 1,200 people and took hostage two hundred and fifty-one others into Gaza.

The local health authority reports over 71,400 people have been killed in the subsequent military campaign.