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Strong cold-season gusts brought walls down onto fragile shelters housing people displaced by war in Gaza, claiming the lives of at least 4 people. These deaths underscores the dangerous living conditions that continue after more than two years of intense airstrikes and critical lack of humanitarian assistance.

Truce Offers No Respite from Severe Elements

While a ceasefire has been in effect since last fall, humanitarian organizations state that Palestinians broadly lack the sufficient shelter required to survive frequent cold-weather events.

Officials at Shifa hospital, which received the victims, said on Tuesday that the dead include a pair of adult females, a girl, and a male adult.

In a separate incident, the Gaza health ministry announced on the same day that a 12-month-old infant died of extreme cold overnight.

"International actors has allowed us to experience loss of life in all its forms," said Bassel Hamouda after the funeral. "While it is correct the bombing may have temporarily stopped, but we have witnessed every conceivable cause of fatality in the world in the Gaza Strip."

Family Buried in Tent Collapse

As per Shifa hospital, three people of a one household — 72-year-old a man, his teenage relative, and his son's wife — were killed when an eight-metre high wall collapsed on top of their tent in a coastal area of the city. No fewer than 5 additional people were hurt in the event.

Family members on that day started clearing the debris that had entombed their family and rebuilding the temporary homes for survivors.

Humanitarian Efforts and Ongoing Emergency

United Nations agencies and its humanitarian partners were handing out shelter kits, plastic sheeting, blankets and clothes as well as nutrition and sanitation supplies throughout Gaza, said the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs.

The majority of Palestinians live in makeshift shelters since their homes were turned into rubble over the course of the war. Aid groups contend an insufficient amount of building supplies are reaching Gaza during the truce.

Fatality Numbers After the Ceasefire

The Gaza health ministry, part of the Hamas-run government, reports over four hundred and forty people have been fatally shot by gunfire and their remains taken to hospitals after the ceasefire began. The authority keeps comprehensive casualty data that are seen as largely accurate by international bodies and independent experts.

A spokesperson for UNICEF, spokesperson for the UN children's fund, said on that day that at least one hundred children below eighteen years old – 60 boys and forty females – had been killed after the truce started because of military operations, including drone strikes, air raids, artillery fire and use of bullets. These numbers, he said, reflected incidents where enough information had been gathered to warrant documentation, but the overall count is expected to be higher. He noted that hundreds of minors had been injured.

"Although 'explosions and gunfire have decreased' under the ceasefire, they have not ceased," Elder informed journalists at a press conference in Geneva by video from Gaza City. "So what the world now calls calm would be considered a crisis anywhere else," he concluded.

Third Winter of Hardship

Gaza’s population of over two million people has been struggling to fend off the freezing temperatures and storms at bay while enduring shortages of humanitarian aid and a lack of sturdier transitional shelter, which is urgently required throughout the colder season. It’s the 3rd cold season after the conflict between Israel and Hamas started on a date in late 2023, when fighters attacked southern Israel and murdered approximately twelve hundred individuals and took hostage two hundred and fifty-one others into Gaza.

Gaza’s health ministry says more than seventy-one thousand four hundred people have been fatally injured in the subsequent military campaign.