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Strong winter winds brought walls down onto fragile shelters housing Palestinians displaced by war in Gaza, claiming the lives of no fewer than four people. These deaths highlights the dangerous living conditions that continue after more than two years of intense airstrikes and severe lack of aid.

Truce Provides Little Respite from Severe Elements

While a ceasefire has been active from last fall, humanitarian organizations state that residents broadly lack the adequate shelter required to survive frequent winter storms.

Medical staff at Gaza City's largest medical facility, which received the victims, said on this week that the deceased were a pair of adult females, a young female, and a male adult.

Separately, the local health authority announced on Tuesday that a 12-month-old infant succumbed of extreme cold during the night.

"The world has enabled us to witness death in all its forms," stated a family member after the burial. "It’s true the shelling may have temporarily stopped, but we have seen every conceivable cause of fatality in the world in the Gaza Strip."

Relatives Crushed in Shelter Collapse

As per Shifa hospital, three people of a one family — elderly a man, his teenage relative, and his daughter-in-law — were killed when an eight-metre tall wall collapsed on top of their tent in a coastal area of Gaza City. No fewer than 5 others were injured in the incident.

Their relatives on Tuesday began removing the rubble that had buried their family and rebuilding the temporary homes for survivors.

Aid Distribution and Continuing Crisis

United Nations agencies and its aid organization allies were distributing shelter kits, plastic sheeting, warm covers and clothing as well as nutrition and sanitation supplies throughout Gaza, stated the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs.

Most of the population live in makeshift shelters because their homes were reduced to ruins during the hostilities. Aid groups say not enough building supplies are reaching Gaza under the truce.

Casualty Numbers Since the Truce

The Gaza health ministry, part of the administration, says more than 440 individuals have been fatally shot by Israeli fire and their remains brought to hospitals after the ceasefire went into effect. The ministry keeps detailed fatality records that are considered generally reliable by international bodies and independent experts.

A spokesperson for UNICEF, representing the UN children’s agency Unicef, said on that day that at least one hundred minors below eighteen years old – 60 boys and forty females – had been killed after the truce started due to military operations, such as drone strikes, airstrikes, artillery fire and employment of bullets. Those figures, he explained, represented cases where sufficient information had been compiled to justify documentation, but the total toll is expected to be greater. He noted that hundreds of children had been wounded.

"Although 'explosions and gunfire have slowed' during the truce, they have not ceased," Elder told reporters at a press conference in the Swiss city by video link from the Strip. "Therefore what the world now calls quiet would be viewed as a catastrophe anywhere else," he said.

Third Cold Season of Struggle

Gaza’s residents of over 2 million individuals has been struggling to fend off the cold weather and storms at bay while facing lack of assistance and a lack of more substantial temporary housing, which is urgently required throughout the winter months. It’s the 3rd cold season after the war involving Israel and the group started on a date in late 2023, when fighters attacked Israeli territory and murdered around twelve hundred individuals and took hostage 251 more into Gaza.

The local health authority says over seventy-one thousand four hundred people have been fatally injured in Israel’s retaliatory offensive.