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Powerful winter gusts brought walls down onto flimsy shelters sheltering people displaced by conflict in Gaza, killing at least four people. These deaths underscores the dangerous living conditions that continue after over two years of devastating airstrikes and severe lack of humanitarian assistance.

Ceasefire Offers No Relief from Harsh Weather

While a ceasefire has been in effect since October, aid groups state that residents broadly lack the adequate shelter necessary to withstand recurring cold-weather events.

Officials at Gaza City's largest medical facility, which took in the bodies, said on this week that the dead include two women, a girl, and a male adult.

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

"International actors has enabled us to witness death in all its forms," said a family member after the burial. "While it is correct the bombing may have paused for now, but we have seen every conceivable cause of death in the world in the Gaza Strip."

Relatives Buried in Shelter Collapse

According to the medical center, 3 members of a one family — 72-year-old Mohamed Hamouda, his teenage relative, and his son's wife — were killed when an 26-foot high wall fell on top of their dwelling in a coastal area of Gaza City. No fewer than five additional people were hurt in the incident.

Their relatives on that day began clearing the rubble that had buried their family and reconstructing the temporary homes for survivors.

Aid Efforts and Continuing Crisis

United Nations agencies and its humanitarian partners were handing out shelter kits, plastic sheeting, warm covers and clothing as well as nutrition and hygiene items across Gaza, stated the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs.

The majority of Palestinians live in improvised shelters because their homes were turned into ruins over the course of the war. Aid groups say an insufficient amount of shelter materials are reaching Gaza under the truce.

Casualty Numbers After the Truce

The Gaza health ministry, part of the Hamas-run government, says more than four hundred and forty individuals have been fatally shot by Israeli fire and their bodies taken to hospitals after the ceasefire began. The authority keeps comprehensive fatality records that are seen as generally reliable by UN agencies and outside analysts.

James Elder, spokesperson for the UN children’s agency Unicef, stated on Tuesday that no fewer than one hundred children below eighteen years old – 60 boys and 40 girls – had been killed since the ceasefire started because of armed actions, including drone strikes, air raids, tank shelling and use of live ammunition. Those figures, he explained, reflected cases where enough information had been gathered to justify documentation, but the total toll is expected to be greater. He added that many hundreds of minors had been wounded.

"While 'explosions and gunfire have decreased' under the truce, they have not stopped," the spokesperson told reporters at a UN briefing in the Swiss city by video link from the Strip. "So what the world now calls quiet would be viewed as a crisis anywhere else," he said.

Another Cold Season of Hardship

Gaza’s residents of more than 2 million people has been fighting to keep the freezing temperatures and storms away while enduring lack of humanitarian aid and a lack of more substantial transitional shelter, which is urgently required during the winter months. This marks the 3rd cold season since the war involving the state and the group started on 7 October 2023, when fighters stormed into Israeli territory and murdered approximately 1,200 people and abducted two hundred and fifty-one others into Gaza.

Gaza’s health ministry says more than 71,400 people have been killed in the subsequent retaliatory offensive.