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Powerful winter winds caused walls to collapse upon fragile tents sheltering Palestinians displaced by conflict in Gaza, killing no fewer than 4 individuals. These deaths highlights the dangerous living conditions that persist after more than two years of intense bombardment and critical lack of humanitarian assistance.

Truce Provides Little Respite from Severe Weather

While a ceasefire has been active since last fall, aid groups report that Palestinians broadly lack the sufficient housing required to withstand recurring winter storms.

Officials at Shifa hospital, which took in the victims, said on Tuesday that the dead include two women, a girl, and a male adult.

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

"International actors has enabled us to witness death in all its forms," said Bassel Hamouda following the funeral. "It’s true the shelling may have paused for now, but we have seen every conceivable cause of death in the world in the Gaza Strip."

Family Buried in Tent Collapse

As per Shifa hospital, 3 people of a single household — elderly a man, his 15-year-old granddaughter, and his daughter-in-law — were killed when an 26-foot high wall fell on top of their tent in a area near the sea of Gaza City. No fewer than five additional people were injured in the incident.

Their relatives on that day began clearing the rubble that had buried their loved ones and reconstructing the temporary homes for survivors.

Aid Distribution and Ongoing Crisis

United Nations agencies and its humanitarian partners were distributing tents, tarps, warm covers and clothing as well as nutrition and sanitation supplies across Gaza, stated the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs.

Most of the population reside in makeshift tents because their houses were reduced to ruins during the war. Aid groups contend an insufficient amount of building supplies are reaching Gaza under the truce.

Casualty Figures Since the Ceasefire

Local health authorities, part of the Hamas-run government, reports over 440 individuals have been killed by Israeli fire and their remains brought to hospitals after the truce went into effect. The authority maintains detailed fatality records that are seen as generally reliable by international bodies and outside analysts.

A spokesperson for UNICEF, representing the UN children’s agency Unicef, said on Tuesday that at least one hundred children under the age of 18 – 60 boys and 40 females – had been lost their lives after the truce began because of military operations, including unmanned aerial vehicle attacks, airstrikes, tank shelling and use of live ammunition. Those figures, he explained, represented cases where enough information had been gathered to warrant documentation, but the total toll is believed to be higher. He noted that many hundreds of children had been wounded.

"Although 'explosions and gunfire have slowed' under the truce, they have not ceased," Elder told journalists at a UN briefing in the Swiss city by video link from the Strip. "So what the international community now calls quiet would be viewed as a crisis anywhere else," he said.

Another Winter of Hardship

Gaza’s population of over two million individuals has been fighting to keep the freezing temperatures and storms away while facing lack of humanitarian aid and a lack of more substantial transitional shelter, which is badly needed throughout the colder season. It’s the third cold season after the conflict involving the state and Hamas started on 7 October 2023, when fighters stormed into Israeli territory and killed approximately twelve hundred people and took hostage two hundred and fifty-one more into Gaza.

The local health authority reports more than seventy-one thousand four hundred people have been killed in the subsequent retaliatory offensive.