GAZA — Yahya Al-Batran woke up in the early hours of Sunday (Dec 29) morning to find his wife, Noura trying to wake their newborn twin sons Jumaa and Ali as they lay together in the makeshift tent the family occupied in an encampment in the central Gaza Strip.

Intense winter cold and heavy rain across the coastal enclave in previous days had made their lives a misery but what he heard was more serious.

"She said she had been trying to wake Jumaa up, but he was not waking up, and I asked about Ali and she said, he was not walking up either," he told Reuters on Sunday. "I held up Jumaa, he was white and freezing like snow, like ice, frozen."

Jumaa, a month old, died of hypothermia, one of six Palestinians who have died of exposure and cold over recent days in Gaza, according to doctors. Ali was in critical condition on Monday in intensive care.

In the second winter of the war in Gaza, the weather has added an extra element of suffering to hundreds of thousands of people already displaced, often multiple times, while efforts to agree a ceasefire go nowhere.

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