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Strong cold-season winds caused walls to collapse upon fragile tents housing people displaced by war in Gaza, claiming the lives of at least 4 people. This tragedy highlights the dangerous situation that persist after over two years of devastating airstrikes and critical lack of humanitarian assistance.

Ceasefire Provides No Respite from Harsh Weather

While a ceasefire has been in effect since last fall, aid groups report that residents broadly lack the adequate shelter necessary to survive recurring cold-weather events.

Officials at Gaza City's largest medical facility, which took in the bodies, reported on this week that the dead were a pair of adult females, a young female, and a man.

Separately, the Gaza health ministry announced on Tuesday that a one-year-old boy succumbed of hypothermia during the night.

"International actors has allowed us to witness death in every possible way," said a family member following the burial. "While it is correct the shelling may have paused for now, but we have seen all imaginable reasons of death in the world in the Gaza Strip."

Family Buried in Shelter Collapse

According to the medical center, three people of a one household — 72-year-old Mohamed Hamouda, his teenage relative, and his son's wife — were killed when an 26-foot high wall fell on top of their dwelling in a area near the sea of Gaza City. At least five others were hurt in the incident.

Their relatives on Tuesday began removing the debris that had entombed their family and rebuilding the temporary homes for survivors.

Humanitarian Efforts and Ongoing Emergency

The UN and its humanitarian partners were handing out tents, tarps, warm covers and clothes as well as food and hygiene supplies across Gaza, stated the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs.

Most of Palestinians live in makeshift tents because their homes were turned into rubble during the war. Humanitarian organizations contend not enough building supplies are reaching Gaza under the truce.

Casualty Figures Since the Truce

Local health authorities, part of the Hamas-run government, reports over 440 people have been fatally shot by Israeli fire and their bodies brought to hospitals after the truce began. The ministry maintains detailed fatality records that are seen as generally reliable by UN agencies and outside analysts.

A spokesperson for UNICEF, representing the UN children’s agency Unicef, said on Tuesday that at least one hundred children below eighteen years old – 60 males and 40 females – had been killed after the truce began due to armed actions, including drone strikes, air raids, tank shelling and use of live ammunition. Those figures, he said, represented cases where sufficient details had been compiled to justify documentation, but the total toll is expected to be greater. He added that many hundreds of children had been wounded.

"While 'explosions and shootings have decreased' under the ceasefire, they have not ceased," the spokesperson informed journalists at a UN briefing in Geneva by video from the Strip. "So what the international community now terms quiet would be considered a crisis anywhere else," he said.

Another Winter of Struggle

Gaza’s population of over two million people has been fighting to keep the cold weather and bad weather away while enduring lack of assistance and a lack of more substantial temporary housing, which is badly needed throughout the colder season. This marks the third cold season since the war between the state and Hamas began on 7 October 2023, when militants stormed into Israeli territory and murdered around twelve hundred people and took hostage 251 others into Gaza.

The local health authority says more than seventy-one thousand four hundred Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military campaign.