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Powerful cold-season gusts caused walls to collapse onto fragile shelters sheltering people displaced by war in Gaza, killing no fewer than 4 people. This tragedy underscores the perilous situation that continue after over 24 months of devastating airstrikes and severe lack of humanitarian assistance.

Ceasefire Provides Little Respite from Harsh Weather

Although a truce has been active from October, aid groups state that residents broadly lack the adequate housing required to withstand recurring cold-weather events.

Officials at Gaza City's largest medical facility, which received the victims, reported on Tuesday that the dead were a pair of adult females, a girl, and a man.

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

"International actors has allowed us to experience death in all its forms," stated a family member after the funeral. "While it is correct 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 the medical center, three members of a one household — 72-year-old a man, his teenage relative, and his son's wife — were fatally injured when an 26-foot high wall collapsed onto their dwelling in a area near the sea of Gaza City. No fewer than 5 others were injured in the event.

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

Aid Distribution and Ongoing Emergency

United Nations agencies and its aid organization allies were distributing tents, plastic sheeting, blankets and clothing as well as food and hygiene supplies throughout Gaza, said the relevant UN coordination body.

Most of the population live in makeshift shelters since their homes were turned into rubble over the course of the war. Humanitarian organizations contend not enough shelter materials are reaching Gaza under the truce.

Fatality Figures Since the Truce

The Gaza health ministry, which is part of the Hamas-run government, says more than 440 individuals have been fatally shot by Israeli fire and their bodies brought to hospitals since the ceasefire went into effect. The ministry keeps detailed fatality records that are seen as generally reliable by international bodies and independent experts.

A spokesperson for UNICEF, representing the UN children's fund, said on Tuesday that no fewer than 100 children under the age of 18 – sixty boys and forty girls – had been lost their lives after the truce began because of military operations, including drone strikes, air raids, artillery fire and use of bullets. Those figures, he explained, represented incidents where enough details had been gathered to warrant documentation, but the overall count is believed to be greater. He added that hundreds of children had been injured.

"Although 'bombings and shootings have slowed' during the truce, they have not stopped," Elder told reporters at a press conference in the Swiss city by video from the Strip. "Therefore what the world now terms quiet would be considered a crisis anywhere else," he concluded.

Third Cold Season of Struggle

Gaza’s population of more than 2 million people has been struggling to fend off the freezing temperatures and storms at bay while facing shortages of assistance and a lack of sturdier transitional shelter, which is urgently needed during the colder season. It’s the third winter after the war between the state and Hamas started on 7 October 2023, when militants stormed into Israeli territory and killed around 1,200 people and abducted two hundred and fifty-one others into Gaza.

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