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Powerful cold-season winds brought walls down onto fragile tents housing Palestinians displaced by war in Gaza, claiming the lives of no fewer than four individuals. These deaths underscores the perilous situation that persist after more than two years of intense airstrikes and critical shortages of aid.

Truce Provides Little Relief from Severe Weather

Although a truce has been active since last fall, humanitarian organizations report that Palestinians do not have the adequate shelter required to withstand frequent winter storms.

Officials at Gaza City's largest medical facility, which took in the bodies, said on Tuesday that the dead include two women, a girl, and a male adult.

Separately, the local health authority announced on Tuesday that a one-year-old boy died of extreme cold overnight.

"The world has enabled us to witness death in all its forms," 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."

Family Crushed in Shelter Collapse

According to Shifa hospital, three members of a one household — elderly Mohamed Hamouda, his teenage granddaughter, and his son's wife — were killed when an eight-metre tall wall collapsed onto their dwelling in a area near the sea of Gaza City. At least 5 additional people were hurt in the event.

Family members on that day started clearing the rubble that had buried their loved ones and rebuilding the temporary homes for survivors.

Humanitarian Efforts and Ongoing Emergency

United Nations agencies and its aid organization allies were handing out tents, plastic sheeting, warm covers and clothes as well as nutrition and hygiene supplies throughout 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 not enough shelter materials are entering Gaza during the ceasefire.

Casualty Figures After the Ceasefire

Local health authorities, part of the administration, reports more than 440 people have been killed by gunfire and their remains taken to hospitals after the truce began. The authority keeps detailed casualty data that are considered generally reliable by UN agencies and outside analysts.

James Elder, representing the UN children’s agency Unicef, said on that day that at least 100 children below eighteen years old – 60 males and forty females – had been killed since the truce began because of armed actions, such as drone strikes, air raids, artillery fire and employment of bullets. Those figures, he explained, represented incidents where sufficient information had been compiled to justify documentation, but the overall count is expected to be higher. He noted that many hundreds of children had been wounded.

"Although 'bombings and shootings have decreased' under the ceasefire, they have not stopped," the spokesperson informed reporters at a press conference in Geneva by video from the Strip. "So what the international community now terms quiet would be considered a crisis in any other place," he said.

Another Cold Season of Hardship

Gaza’s residents of more than 2 million people has been struggling to keep the cold weather and bad weather at bay while enduring shortages of humanitarian aid and a lack of more substantial transitional shelter, which is badly required during the colder season. This marks the third cold season after the conflict involving the state and Hamas started on a date in late 2023, when fighters attacked southern Israel and murdered approximately 1,200 people and abducted two hundred and fifty-one others into Gaza.

The local health authority says over seventy-one thousand four hundred Palestinians have been killed in the subsequent retaliatory offensive.