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Strong cold-season gusts brought walls down onto flimsy shelters sheltering people displaced by conflict in Gaza, claiming the lives of no fewer than 4 people. This tragedy highlights the perilous living conditions that persist after more than two years of intense bombardment and critical lack of humanitarian assistance.

Truce Provides Little Relief from Harsh Weather

While a ceasefire has been in effect since October, aid groups state that residents do not have the adequate shelter required to survive frequent winter storms.

Officials at Gaza City's largest medical facility, which received the bodies, said on Tuesday that the deceased include a pair of adult females, a girl, and a male adult.

Separately, the Gaza health ministry stated on the same day that a 12-month-old infant succumbed of hypothermia overnight.

"International actors has allowed us to experience loss of life in every possible way," said a family member after the burial. "It’s true the bombing may have temporarily stopped, but we have witnessed every conceivable cause of fatality in the world in the Gaza Strip."

Relatives Crushed in Shelter Collapse

As per the medical center, 3 members of a single family — elderly a man, his 15-year-old relative, and his son's wife — were killed when an 26-foot high wall fell onto their tent in a area near the sea of the city. No fewer than 5 additional people were injured in the incident.

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

Aid Efforts and Continuing Emergency

United Nations agencies and its humanitarian partners were distributing tents, tarps, warm covers and clothing as well as nutrition and hygiene supplies across Gaza, stated the relevant UN coordination body.

The majority of the population live in makeshift tents because their houses were reduced to ruins over the course of the war. Aid groups say not enough shelter materials are reaching Gaza during the ceasefire.

Casualty Figures After the Ceasefire

Local health authorities, which is part of the Hamas-run government, says more than 440 individuals have been fatally shot by gunfire and their bodies brought to hospitals since the ceasefire went into effect. The authority keeps comprehensive fatality records that are considered 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 girls – had been lost their lives after the ceasefire started because of military operations, such as unmanned aerial vehicle attacks, air raids, tank shelling and employment of bullets. Those figures, he said, reflected cases where sufficient information had been gathered to justify documentation, but the total toll is believed to be greater. He noted that hundreds of minors had been injured.

"While 'explosions and gunfire have slowed' during the truce, they have not ceased," Elder told reporters at a UN briefing in the Swiss city by video from the Strip. "Therefore what the international community now terms quiet would be considered a crisis anywhere else," he said.

Another Cold Season of Struggle

Gaza’s population of more than two million people has been fighting to fend off the cold weather and bad weather at bay while enduring shortages of humanitarian aid and a lack of sturdier temporary housing, which is urgently required throughout the colder season. This marks the third cold season since the conflict between the state and Hamas started on 7 October 2023, when fighters attacked Israeli territory and killed approximately 1,200 people and abducted two hundred and fifty-one others into Gaza.

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