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Powerful cold-season gusts caused walls to collapse onto fragile shelters sheltering Palestinians uprooted by conflict in Gaza, killing no fewer than 4 individuals. These deaths highlights the dangerous situation that continue after over 24 months of intense airstrikes and severe shortages of aid.

Ceasefire Provides No Respite from Severe Elements

Although a ceasefire has been active from October, humanitarian organizations report that residents broadly lack the sufficient shelter required to survive frequent cold-weather events.

Medical staff at Gaza City's largest medical facility, which took in the victims, said on Tuesday that the deceased were two women, a girl, and a male adult.

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

"International actors has allowed us to witness loss of life in every possible way," said a family member after the funeral. "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."

Family Buried in Tent Collapse

According to Shifa hospital, three members of a single family — elderly Mohamed Hamouda, his 15-year-old granddaughter, and his son's wife — were killed when an 26-foot tall wall collapsed on top of their dwelling in a coastal area of Gaza City. No fewer than 5 others were injured in the event.

Their relatives on Tuesday started clearing the rubble that had buried their family and rebuilding the tent shelters for those who remained.

Humanitarian Efforts and Ongoing Crisis

United Nations agencies and its aid organization allies were distributing shelter kits, tarps, warm covers and clothing as well as food and hygiene supplies across Gaza, said the relevant UN coordination body.

Most of Palestinians live in improvised tents because their homes were reduced to ruins over the course of the hostilities. Humanitarian organizations contend an insufficient amount of shelter materials are reaching Gaza under the truce.

Casualty Numbers After the Ceasefire

Local health authorities, which is part of the Hamas-run government, says more than four hundred and forty individuals have been killed by Israeli fire and their remains brought to hospitals after the truce went into effect. The ministry maintains detailed fatality data that are considered largely accurate by international bodies and independent experts.

James Elder, representing the UN children’s agency Unicef, stated on Tuesday that at least 100 children below eighteen years old – 60 boys and 40 girls – had been killed after the ceasefire started due to armed actions, such as drone strikes, airstrikes, tank shelling and use of live ammunition. Those figures, he explained, reflected incidents where sufficient details had been gathered to justify recording, but the total toll is expected to be greater. He noted that hundreds of minors had been wounded.

"Although 'explosions and shootings have decreased' during the truce, they have not stopped," Elder told reporters at a press conference in Geneva by video link from Gaza City. "So what the international community now calls calm would be considered a catastrophe in any other place," he concluded.

Another Cold Season of Struggle

Gaza’s residents of over two million people has been struggling to fend off the freezing temperatures and storms at bay while enduring shortages of assistance and a lack of more substantial transitional shelter, which is urgently needed throughout the colder season. It’s the 3rd cold season since the conflict involving Israel and the group began on 7 October 2023, when fighters stormed into Israeli territory and murdered approximately twelve hundred people and took hostage 251 others into Gaza.

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