Israel carried out multiple strikes across Gaza on Saturday, killing at least 30 people in one of the deadliest days since a ceasefire came into effect three months ago.
The strikes targeted locations across the governorate, including an apartment building in Gaza City, where three children were killed alongside their aunt and grandmother. Seven others were killed in a strike on a tent camp in Khan Younis, including a father, his three children and three grandchildren.
“We came running and found my cousins lying here and there, with fire raging,” Atallah Abu Hadaiyed told the Associated Press. “We don’t know if we’re at war or at peace, or what. Where is the truce? Where is the ceasefire they talked about?”
Another airstrike, on a police station in Gaza City, killed at least 14, according to the director of the Shifa Hospital, Mohammed Abu Salmiya.
The Israeli military said it had targeted Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad commanders and infrastructure in response to an alleged ceasefire violation a day earlier.
The strikes came ahead of the reopening of a key border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, under the second phase of a US-led plan to end the war.
Israel sealed Gaza’s borders after Hamas launched a deadly attack on 7 October 2023, trapping the strip’s population of just over 2 million under Israeli bombardment.
This onslaught has killed 71,660 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry – a figure Israel had previously dismissed as Hamas propaganda. But a senior security official told Israeli journalists last week that the number was broadly accurate – and doesn’t include an estimated 10,000 missing Palestinians who remain buried beneath the rubble.
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The official said it wasn’t clear how many of the dead were members of Hamas, or how many had died as a direct result of fighting. Prior to the ceasefire, the Israeli military said it had killed at least 22,000 combatants, with two to three civilians killed for every “terror operative”.
More than 500 Palestinians have been killed since the US-brokered ceasefire on 10 October. Four Israeli soldiers have also been killed over the same period.
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Israeli troops remain in control of a large part of the Gaza strip, even after pulling back as part of the ceasefire deal. Hamas is still in charge of the rest of the enclave, though the second phase of the agreement stipulates that it must disarm. Senior Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzouk last week said that Hamas would never agree to disarm.
US president Donald Trump has threatened to destroy the group if it refuses to disarm, and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there would be no reconstruction before it does so.
Photograph by Saeed M. M. T. Jaras/Anadolu via Getty Images