🔗 Share this article

Strong cold-season winds caused walls to collapse upon flimsy tents housing people uprooted by war in Gaza, claiming the lives of no fewer than four people. These deaths highlights the dangerous living conditions that persist after over 24 months of devastating airstrikes and critical lack of humanitarian assistance.

Ceasefire Offers Little Relief from Severe Weather

Although a truce has been in effect from October, humanitarian organizations report that residents broadly lack the adequate housing necessary to survive frequent winter storms.

Medical staff at Gaza City's largest medical facility, which took in the victims, said on this week that the dead were two women, a girl, and a man.

In a separate incident, the local health authority announced on the same day that a 12-month-old infant succumbed of hypothermia during the night.

"The world has enabled us to witness loss of life in every possible way," said a family member after the burial. "While it is correct the bombing 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 members of a single household — elderly Mohamed Hamouda, his teenage granddaughter, and his daughter-in-law — were killed when an eight-metre tall wall collapsed 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 removing the rubble that had buried their loved ones and reconstructing the tent shelters for those who remained.

Aid Distribution and Ongoing Emergency

The UN and its humanitarian partners were distributing tents, tarps, blankets and clothing as well as nutrition and sanitation items throughout Gaza, said the relevant UN coordination body.

Most of the population reside in improvised tents because their homes were reduced to rubble over the course of the war. Aid groups say an insufficient amount of building supplies are reaching Gaza during the truce.

Fatality Numbers After the Ceasefire

Local health authorities, part of the Hamas-run government, says over 440 individuals have been killed by gunfire and their remains brought to hospitals after the truce went into effect. The authority maintains comprehensive fatality data that are considered generally reliable by international bodies and outside analysts.

A spokesperson for UNICEF, spokesperson for the UN children's fund, said on Tuesday that at least 100 minors under the age of 18 – sixty boys and 40 girls – had been killed since the truce started because of armed actions, such as unmanned aerial vehicle attacks, air raids, tank shelling and employment of live ammunition. Those figures, he explained, represented incidents where sufficient information had been gathered to justify recording, but the total toll is believed to be higher. He added that hundreds of minors had been injured.

"While 'explosions and gunfire have decreased' under the truce, they have not ceased," Elder informed journalists at a press conference in Geneva by video link from Gaza City. "So what the world now terms calm would be considered a catastrophe in any other place," he concluded.

Another Cold Season of Hardship

Gaza’s population of over 2 million people has been fighting to keep the freezing temperatures and storms at bay while facing lack of humanitarian aid and a lack of sturdier temporary housing, which is badly needed during the colder season. It’s the third winter since the war involving the state and the group started on a date in late 2023, when militants attacked southern Israel and murdered around 1,200 people and abducted 251 more into Gaza.

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