Yahya Al-Batran woke up in the early hours of Sunday 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, Reuters reports.

“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 yesterday in intensive care.

“Since I am an adult I may take this and endure it, but what did the young one do to deserve this?” Jumaa’s mother, Noura al-Batran said, as she held embraced her son’s colourful blanket to her chest. “He could not endure it, he could not endure the cold or the hunger and this hopelessness.”

Yahya al-Batran’s family, from the northern town of Beit Lahiya, fled their home early in the offensive for al-Maghazi, an open-air patch of dunes and scrubland in central Gaza which Israeli authorities decreed as a humanitarian zone. Later on, as al-Maghazi became increasingly unsafe, they moved to another encampment in nearby Deir al-Balah city.

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