🔗 Share this article

Powerful winter gusts brought walls down onto flimsy shelters housing Palestinians displaced by conflict in Gaza, claiming the lives of at least 4 people. This tragedy highlights the dangerous living conditions that continue after more than 24 months of devastating airstrikes and severe lack of humanitarian assistance.

Ceasefire Provides No Relief from Severe Elements

Although a ceasefire has been in effect from October, humanitarian organizations state that residents broadly lack the adequate shelter necessary to survive frequent winter storms.

Medical staff at Shifa hospital, which received the bodies, said on this week that the dead include two women, a young female, and a man.

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

"The world has enabled us to witness death in every possible way," stated a family member after the funeral. "It’s true the shelling may have paused for now, but we have seen all imaginable reasons of fatality in the world in the Gaza Strip."

Relatives Crushed in Shelter Collapse

As per the medical center, three people of a single household — 72-year-old a man, his 15-year-old granddaughter, and his daughter-in-law — were fatally injured when an 26-foot tall wall collapsed on top of their tent in a area near the sea of the city. No fewer than 5 additional people were injured in the incident.

Their relatives on Tuesday started removing the debris that had entombed their family and rebuilding the tent shelters for survivors.

Humanitarian Distribution and Ongoing Emergency

United Nations agencies and its aid organization allies were handing out shelter kits, plastic sheeting, blankets and clothing as well as food and hygiene items across Gaza, said the relevant UN coordination body.

Most of the population live in improvised tents since their houses were reduced to ruins over the course of the war. Humanitarian organizations contend an insufficient amount of building supplies are entering Gaza under the truce.

Casualty Numbers After the Truce

Local health authorities, which is part of the Hamas-run government, says more than four hundred and forty people have been killed by Israeli fire and their remains brought to hospitals after the truce went into effect. The authority keeps detailed fatality records that are considered generally reliable by UN agencies and independent experts.

James Elder, representing the UN children’s agency Unicef, stated on that day that no fewer than 100 children below eighteen years old – 60 males and forty girls – had been lost their lives since the ceasefire started because of armed actions, including unmanned aerial vehicle attacks, air raids, artillery fire and employment of live ammunition. These numbers, he explained, represented incidents where sufficient details had been compiled to justify recording, but the total toll is expected to be greater. He added that hundreds of children had been injured.

"Although 'bombings and gunfire have slowed' during the truce, they have not ceased," the spokesperson told journalists at a UN briefing in the Swiss city by video from the Strip. "Therefore what the world now terms calm would be considered a catastrophe anywhere else," he said.

Third Cold Season of Struggle

Gaza’s residents of more than 2 million individuals has been fighting to fend off the cold weather and bad weather at bay while enduring lack of assistance and a lack of sturdier transitional shelter, which is urgently required throughout the winter months. It’s the 3rd winter after the war between the state and the group started on 7 October 2023, when militants attacked Israeli territory and murdered around 1,200 individuals and took hostage 251 more into Gaza.

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