Baby in Gaza freezes to death as UN counts 245 child deaths in West Bank

TEHRAN — Kinan Ahmad Raqiq died in a tent in Khan Younis on November 12. He was nine months old. Gaza’s Health Ministry called it the first cold-related death of the winter. The hospital that received his body, Nasser, had been hit by an Israeli airstrike the same day. Six people were killed, among them the surgeon Rizq Abu Shaeira. “I woke up only to see his skin had turned blue, so I rushed him to Nasser Hospital, but he had already died from hypothermia and frozen to death,” his father, Ahmed Raqiq, told AFP.

The baby died after a storm that Gaza’s Government Media Office says flooded about 70,000 tents in 12 hours. Oxfam estimates the water displaced around 100,000 people. By November 8, the UN humanitarian office, OCHA, had received appeals from more than 26,000 households whose shelters or belongings were damaged. Shelter on the wrong side of the border About 1.4 million Palestinians, 65 percent of Gaza’s population, now live in tents or makeshift shelters, OCHA says.

More than 150,000 tents are waiting outside the Strip. Inside, aid agencies have virtually nothing left to distribute. In early November, they calculated that Gaza needed 121,000 tents and 57,000 emergency shelter kits. None of the kits were in stock. In October, the UN migration agency, IOM, said the supply pipeline covered only 17 percent of winter shelter needs. Reuters reported that 8,600 emergency shelter kits were held up. The so-called ceasefire was supposed to ease this.

A year on, Gaza’s Government Media Office says only 35 percent of the agreed aid and reconstruction trucks had entered by late August. Gaza’s civil defense, which warned that infants, the elderly and the sick faced the greatest danger this season, counts ten cold deaths last winter. This winter has barely started. The West Bank toll On November 13, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said Israeli forces had killed at least 245 Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank since October 7, 2023. 41 of them died in incidents involving reported stone-throwing.

“The killing of a child for simply carrying or throwing stones is abhorrent,” Türk said. Other monitors count differently but land in the same range. The Israeli rights group B’Tselem put the figure at 235 through June and found that only two of the 54 children and teenagers killed in 2025 were armed with guns when shot. This week, Israeli forces shot dead 14-year-old Moataz Iyad Daghlas in Burqa, near Nablus, and wounded two other teenagers.

Palestinian authorities say troops held the boy’s body and kept ambulance crews from reaching him. Settlers add to the picture. ACLED says 2026 is the most violent year for settler violence in the West Bank since it began tracking incidents in 2016. On October 26, a UN Commission of Inquiry said Israel had continued to commit genocidal acts in Gaza despite the ceasefire and had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied Palestinian territory.

Separated by a few dozen miles, Gaza and the West Bank are bound together by the same machinery of genocide. In Gaza, Israel weaponizes the cold itself, blocking basic tents and shelter kits stacked right outside the border. In the West Bank, soldiers and armed settlers execute Palestinian children with total impunity under an apartheid regime shielded by Washington. Kinan Raqiq is the first child frozen to death by Israel’s siege this winter, and as temperatures plunge, the genocidal campaign against Palestinian survival continues unchecked.