GAZA STRIP — Palestinian babies are dying of cold in Gaza, not because winter is unusually harsh, but because Israel has engineered living conditions in which survival itself has become impossible. At least nine infants and young children have now died from cold-related causes this winter, medical officials say, deaths that doctors, rights groups, and analysts describe as entirely foreseeable, preventable, and politically produced.

On Tuesday, seven-month-old Shatha Abu Jarad died in Gaza City’s al-Daraj neighbourhood after suffering cardiac arrest caused by extreme cold exposure. Days earlier, 27-day-old Aisha Ayesh al-Agha died in Khan Younis under similar conditions. Both babies were living with families displaced by Israel’s war, sheltering in environments without heating, insulation, or basic winter protection.

“These babies did not die from weather,” a paediatrician at Gaza City’s Al-Ahli Hospital told Anadolu. “They died from exposure, and exposure is the result of siege, displacement, and the denial of shelter.”

Health officials say at least nine children have now died due to cold since the start of winter, though medics warn the figure is likely an undercount as deaths in displacement camps often go unrecorded amid the collapse of Gaza’s health system.

“We Wrapped Her in Plastic”

For families on the ground, the deaths are neither abstract nor sudden.

“We wrapped her in plastic because there were no blankets,” said a relative of Shatha Abu Jarad, speaking to local journalists in Gaza City. “We tried to keep her warm with our bodies. There was no electricity, no heater, no fuel. She kept crying until her breathing slowed.”

In Khan Younis, neighbours of Aisha al-Agha described a similar scene.

“She was born into war and died in the cold,” said one displaced woman sheltering nearby. “We live in tents that flood when it rains and freeze at night. The babies turn blue.”

Journalists reporting from Beit Lahia and Jabalia in northern Gaza have documented families burning scraps of plastic and debris to generate heat, releasing toxic fumes, because fuel remains largely barred from entry.

A Manufactured Humanitarian Disaster:

According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, around 90 percent of civilian infrastructure has been destroyed or damaged, leaving more than two million people without safe housing. Over 90 percent of Gaza’s population has been forcibly displaced, many multiple times.

Despite a ceasefire that entered its first phase on 10 October 2025, Israel has failed to meet its obligations to open crossings and allow the agreed quantities of shelter materials, fuel, and humanitarian aid into the enclave.

“The ceasefire exists on paper,” said a humanitarian official with an international NGO operating in Gaza. “In reality, Israel controls what enters, and what enters is nowhere near enough to keep people alive, let alone warm.”

Since the ceasefire, at least 464 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 1,280 injured in Israeli attacks, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Overall, Israel’s war has killed more than 100,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, since October 2023.

Tents, Ruins, And Death Traps:

With Israel continuing to ban the entry of temporary housing units (caravans) and construction materials, families are trapped between two deadly options: living in bomb-damaged buildings at risk of collapse or sheltering in fragile tents exposed to winter storms.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has documented the collapse of at least 50 residential buildings since October, killing 18 civilians this month alone. Heavy rains have accelerated structural erosion in homes already weakened by Israeli bombardment.

“Rainwater seeps into cracked foundations, making collapse inevitable,” Euro-Med said in a recent statement. “This is not a natural disaster; it is a policy outcome.”

At the same time, winter storms have destroyed around 27,000 tents, washing away food, clothing, and medicine. Many camps are located in low-lying areas without drainage, compounding flood risk and disease outbreaks.

“Israel Is Weaponising Winter”:

Human rights organisations say Israel’s policies amount to the deliberate weaponisation of winter conditions.

“Blocking shelter is not a side effect of war; it is a method,” said Euro-Med Monitor. “Israel is deliberately subjecting Palestinians to living conditions calculated to destroy life.”

The organisation argues that Israel’s blockade and ban on temporary housing fulfil the genocidal act defined under the Genocide Convention as “deliberately inflicting conditions of life intended to bring about physical destruction.”

Analysts echo this assessment.

“When babies freeze to death in tents while housing units are blocked at crossings, intent becomes impossible to deny,” said a regional analyst speaking to independent media. “This is about making Gaza unliveable.”

Legal Obligations Ignored:

Under international humanitarian law, Israel, as an occupying power, is legally obligated to ensure adequate shelter, protection from the elements, and civilian safety. These duties are non-negotiable and cannot be suspended under security pretexts.

“The right to housing and protection from cold is not optional,” said a UN-affiliated legal expert. “Any deliberate restriction on shelter supplies constitutes a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions.”

Euro-Med Monitor has urged:

• Immediate lifting of the ban on temporary housing and shelter materials
• Unrestricted humanitarian access
• International sanctions and accountability mechanisms
• Enforcement of the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures

The group has also called on the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing to issue an urgent appeal warning that maintaining the shelter ban during winter amounts to “deliberate killing through imposed living conditions.”

Babies As Evidence:

For doctors in Gaza, the deaths of Shatha Abu Jarad, Aisha al-Agha, and other infants are not isolated tragedies; they are evidence.

“These babies are proof,” said a senior medic in northern Gaza. “Proof that the blockade kills. Proof that winter has been turned into a weapon. Proof that this suffering is intentional.”

As temperatures continue to drop, aid workers warn that more babies will die unless Israel allows the immediate entry of housing units, fuel, and winter supplies.

Until then, Palestinian families remain exposed, their children wrapped in plastic, their shelters collapsing, and their survival hanging in the balance of decisions made far beyond Gaza’s sealed borders.

In Summary: Erasure Behind The Rhetoric Of “Security”.

As Palestinian babies freeze to death in Gaza, the continued insistence by Israel and its allies that “Hamas is the problem” has become one of the most effective and lethal propaganda tools of this war. It functions not as an explanation, but as a distraction: a narrative deployed to obscure a far deeper reality rooted in Zionist state policy, racial domination, and expansionist ambition.

The deaths of infants from cold, hunger, and exposure cannot be attributed to Hamas. Hamas does not control Gaza’s borders, airspace, sea, fuel supplies, or the entry of housing and reconstruction materials. Hamas does not decide whether tents, caravans, blankets, heaters, or building supplies are allowed to enter. These decisions are made by Israel, knowingly, deliberately, and with full awareness of their lethal consequences.

Invoking Hamas to explain why babies die of hypothermia is not analysis; it is propaganda by substitution. It launders policies of collective punishment, forced displacement, and demographic engineering through the language of counterterrorism, while erasing Israel’s legal responsibility as the occupying power and architect of Gaza’s living conditions.

At its core, what is unfolding is not only the destruction of present life, but the systematic erasure of a future generation of Palestinians. When infants die before reaching their first birthday, when children grow up malnourished, homeless, and traumatised; when families are denied the means to shelter, reproduce safely, and raise their children with dignity, the continuity of a people itself is under assault.

Human rights organisations and legal scholars increasingly argue that this pattern reflects a settler-colonial logic: to fragment, reduce, and ultimately eliminate Palestinian presence on the land, either through death, permanent displacement, or conditions so unliveable that survival becomes untenable. Those who remain are not meant to flourish, but to exist in a state of managed dependency, stripped of autonomy and reduced to bare survival, a condition many experts describe as bordering on modern forms of enslavement prohibited under international law.

This is not merely a humanitarian crisis; it is a demographic and generational one. A population denied shelter, healthcare, education, stability, and safety cannot sustain itself. The freezing deaths of babies are not tragic anomalies; they are early indicators of a broader project aimed at extinguishing Palestinian futurity.

The consequences extend far beyond Gaza. Israel’s expansionist policies, in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, Lebanon, and Syria, have become a central driver of regional instability, exporting violence, displacement, and militarisation across the Middle East. Far from delivering security, this approach entrenches chaos and perpetual war.

When infants die of cold in a besieged territory while shelter materials are blocked, and the international community continues to invoke “self-defence,” the issue is no longer ignorance. It is wilful complicity.

This is not a war on Hamas.
It is a war on Palestinian existence, on children, continuity, and the very possibility of a future generation.

History will not remember how often Hamas was blamed.
It will remember that babies froze to death, and that their erasure was explained away as security.