🔗 Share this article

Strong cold-season winds caused walls to collapse upon fragile tents sheltering Palestinians uprooted by conflict in Gaza, killing at least 4 individuals. These deaths underscores the perilous living conditions that continue after more than 24 months of intense airstrikes and severe shortages of aid.

Ceasefire Provides No Relief from Severe Elements

While a ceasefire has been active from October, humanitarian organizations report that residents broadly lack the sufficient shelter required to withstand frequent winter storms.

Medical staff at Shifa hospital, which took in the victims, said on Tuesday that the dead were a pair of adult females, a girl, and a man.

Separately, the Gaza health ministry announced on Tuesday that a one-year-old boy succumbed of extreme cold overnight.

"The world has enabled us to experience death in every possible way," said Bassel Hamouda following the burial. "While it is correct the shelling may have paused for now, but we have witnessed all imaginable reasons of death in the world in the Gaza Strip."

Relatives Buried in Tent Collapse

According to the medical center, three people of a one family — elderly a man, his 15-year-old relative, and his daughter-in-law — were killed when an 26-foot tall wall fell onto their tent in a coastal area of Gaza City. At least 5 others were injured in the incident.

Family members on that day started removing the rubble that had buried their loved ones and rebuilding the tent shelters for those who remained.

Aid Efforts and Continuing Crisis

United Nations agencies and its humanitarian partners were distributing tents, plastic sheeting, warm covers and clothes as well as food and hygiene items across Gaza, stated the relevant UN coordination body.

Most of Palestinians reside in improvised tents since their houses were turned into rubble over the course of the hostilities. Humanitarian organizations say not enough shelter materials are entering Gaza during the ceasefire.

Casualty Figures Since the Ceasefire

Local health authorities, which is part of the administration, reports over 440 individuals have been killed by gunfire and their bodies brought to hospitals after the truce began. The ministry maintains detailed casualty records that are considered generally reliable by international bodies and outside analysts.

James Elder, spokesperson for the UN children’s agency Unicef, stated on Tuesday that at least one hundred children under the age of 18 – 60 boys and forty girls – had been lost their lives after the truce began due to military operations, such as unmanned aerial vehicle attacks, air raids, tank shelling and employment of bullets. These numbers, he explained, represented cases where sufficient details had been gathered to warrant recording, but the overall count is expected to be higher. He added that hundreds of children had been injured.

"While 'bombings and gunfire have slowed' during the ceasefire, they have not stopped," the spokesperson told reporters at a UN briefing in Geneva by video from the Strip. "Therefore what the international community now terms calm would be considered a crisis anywhere else," he concluded.

Third Winter of Hardship

Gaza’s residents of over two million people has been fighting to keep the freezing temperatures and bad weather at bay while enduring lack of assistance and a absence of sturdier transitional shelter, which is urgently required during the colder season. It’s the 3rd cold season since the war between Israel and Hamas began on 7 October 2023, when militants attacked Israeli territory and murdered approximately twelve hundred people and took hostage two hundred and fifty-one others into Gaza.

Gaza’s health ministry says over seventy-one thousand four hundred people have been fatally injured in the subsequent military campaign.