Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip killed at least five people on the event date, according to health officials, in the latest episode of violence reported despite the ceasefire framework in place since October.
Medics said two people died when an Israeli air strike hit a crowd near a municipal public park in Gaza City, an area described as densely packed with displaced families. Several others were reported wounded. A separate strike hit a vehicle in the Tal al-Hawa neighbourhood in western Gaza City and killed at least three more people, health officials said.
The Israeli military said both strikes targeted Hamas fighters, but it did not provide evidence to support that claim. That left the incident, as reported by health officials and described by witnesses in the original account, in the familiar pattern of competing battlefield narratives: Palestinian health authorities giving casualty counts from the ground, and the Israeli military presenting its own explanation for the attacks.
The killings came as Israel intensified attacks across Gaza in recent days. The reported deaths on the event date followed earlier strikes in Deir el-Balah on Sunday that killed two Palestinians, including a three-year-old child, and attacks on Saturday that killed at least four people, according to the same account. The sequence suggests that the ceasefire has not halted air operations or prevented continued Palestinian deaths.
At al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical facility, relatives and friends paid their respects to two of the men killed before taking the bodies to a cemetery for burial. The funerals underscored the continuing human toll of the conflict in Gaza, where families have repeatedly been forced to move between hospitals, burial grounds and temporary shelters as fighting continues.
The report also said the Gaza Ministry of Health has counted 1,313 Palestinians killed since the ceasefire took effect. The Palestinian Centre for Missing and Forcibly Disappeared Persons said on Saturday that 4,000 to 5,000 Palestinians remain missing and are believed to be dead under rubble.
The broader war has now killed nearly 73,500 Palestinians in Gaza and injured nearly 174,500 since October 2023, according to the Health Ministry cited in the source report. Those figures cannot be independently verified in the excerpt alone, but they reflect the scale of destruction that continues to frame every new strike.
The military said it was acting against Hamas targets, but the report supplied no evidence from Israel to corroborate the assertion. For residents of Gaza, the immediate reality remained far more concrete: air strikes, fires, wounded civilians and newly dug graves.
The event date account points to a conflict that has not settled into peace so much as into intermittent, still-deadly violence, even as formal ceasefire language remains in place on paper.
