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Strong winter gusts brought walls down onto flimsy tents housing Palestinians displaced by conflict in Gaza, claiming the lives of at least 4 people. These deaths highlights the dangerous situation that continue after more than 24 months of intense airstrikes and critical lack of aid.

Truce Provides Little Respite from Severe Elements

While a ceasefire has been active since last fall, humanitarian organizations state that Palestinians broadly lack the sufficient shelter necessary to withstand recurring cold-weather events.

Medical staff at Shifa hospital, which received the victims, said on Tuesday that the deceased include two women, a girl, and a man.

In a separate incident, the local health authority announced on the same day that a one-year-old boy died of extreme cold overnight.

"The world has allowed us to witness death in every possible way," stated a family member after the funeral. "While it is correct the shelling may have temporarily stopped, but we have witnessed all imaginable reasons of fatality in the world in the Gaza Strip."

Relatives Buried in Tent Collapse

According to the medical center, 3 members of a single household — 72-year-old Mohamed Hamouda, his 15-year-old granddaughter, and his daughter-in-law — were killed when an eight-metre tall wall collapsed onto their dwelling in a coastal area of Gaza City. At least five additional people were injured in the incident.

Their relatives on that day began removing the debris that had entombed their loved ones and rebuilding the tent shelters for those who remained.

Aid Efforts and Continuing Emergency

United Nations agencies and its humanitarian partners were handing out tents, tarps, blankets and clothes as well as food and sanitation items across Gaza, said the relevant UN coordination body.

Most of the population live in improvised tents because their houses were reduced to ruins during the hostilities. Humanitarian organizations say an insufficient amount of shelter materials are entering Gaza under the truce.

Fatality Numbers After the Ceasefire

Local health authorities, which is part of the administration, says over 440 individuals have been killed by Israeli fire and their bodies taken to hospitals since the ceasefire went into effect. The authority keeps detailed fatality data that are seen as generally reliable by UN agencies and independent experts.

A spokesperson for UNICEF, representing the UN children's fund, said on Tuesday that no fewer than 100 children below eighteen years old – sixty males and 40 girls – had been killed since the ceasefire started because of armed actions, such as unmanned aerial vehicle attacks, airstrikes, tank shelling and employment of live ammunition. These numbers, he said, reflected incidents where sufficient information had been compiled to warrant recording, but the overall count is believed to be higher. He noted that many hundreds of children had been wounded.

"Although 'explosions and gunfire have decreased' during the ceasefire, they have not stopped," Elder told reporters at a UN briefing in Geneva by video link from the Strip. "Therefore what the world now terms calm would be viewed as a crisis in any other place," he said.

Third Winter of Struggle

Gaza’s population of over 2 million people has been struggling to keep the freezing temperatures and bad weather at bay while facing lack of assistance and a lack of more substantial transitional shelter, which is badly required throughout the winter months. It’s the 3rd cold season after the conflict involving Israel and Hamas started on a date in late 2023, when fighters stormed into southern Israel and murdered around twelve hundred people and took hostage two hundred and fifty-one others into Gaza.

The local health authority says over seventy-one thousand four hundred Palestinians have been fatally injured in Israel’s military campaign.