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Powerful cold-season winds brought walls down onto fragile tents housing people displaced by war in Gaza, killing no fewer than four individuals. These deaths underscores the dangerous situation that persist after more than two years of devastating airstrikes and critical shortages of humanitarian assistance.

Truce Offers No Respite from Harsh Elements

Although a truce has been in effect from last fall, aid groups state that residents broadly lack the sufficient shelter required to survive recurring winter storms.

Officials at Gaza City's largest medical facility, which took in the victims, reported 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 one-year-old boy died of extreme cold during the night.

"International actors has allowed us to witness loss of life in all its forms," stated Bassel Hamouda after the funeral. "It’s true the shelling may have paused for now, but we have seen all imaginable reasons of death in the world in the Gaza Strip."

Relatives Crushed in Shelter Collapse

According to Shifa hospital, three people of a single family — elderly Mohamed Hamouda, his 15-year-old relative, and his daughter-in-law — were killed when an 26-foot tall wall fell onto their tent in a area near the sea of Gaza City. At least five others were hurt in the incident.

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

Humanitarian Distribution and Continuing Crisis

United Nations agencies and its humanitarian partners were handing out shelter kits, tarps, blankets and clothes as well as nutrition and sanitation items throughout Gaza, stated the relevant UN coordination body.

Most of the population reside in makeshift tents because their homes were turned into rubble during the hostilities. Aid groups say an insufficient amount of building supplies are entering Gaza during the ceasefire.

Fatality Figures After the Truce

Local health authorities, part of the administration, reports more than 440 people have been killed by gunfire and their bodies brought to hospitals since the ceasefire went into effect. The authority keeps detailed casualty data that are seen as largely accurate by UN agencies and outside analysts.

A spokesperson for UNICEF, spokesperson for the UN children’s agency Unicef, stated on that day that at least one hundred children below eighteen years old – 60 males and forty girls – had been killed since the ceasefire began because of armed actions, such as unmanned aerial vehicle attacks, airstrikes, tank shelling and use of live ammunition. These numbers, he explained, represented cases where enough details had been gathered to justify recording, but the overall count is expected to be greater. He added that many hundreds of minors had been injured.

"While 'explosions and gunfire have slowed' during the truce, they have not ceased," the spokesperson told journalists at a UN briefing in the Swiss city by video link from the Strip. "So what the world now calls calm would be considered a crisis anywhere else," he said.

Third Winter of Struggle

Gaza’s residents of over two million individuals has been struggling to fend off the freezing temperatures and bad weather away while facing lack of assistance and a lack of more substantial temporary housing, which is urgently needed throughout the colder season. This marks the 3rd winter after the conflict between Israel and Hamas started on 7 October 2023, when fighters attacked Israeli territory and killed around twelve hundred people and took hostage 251 others into Gaza.

Gaza’s health ministry says more than seventy-one thousand four hundred Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory offensive.