Eight Palestinians killed in Gaza on Sunday, including five police officers in al-Mawasi and a four-year-old in Gaza City
At least eight Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks across Gaza on Sunday, hospital and ministry sources said: five police officers in a drone strike in al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis, and three people, including a four-year-old boy, in a separate strike in Gaza City, despite the ceasefire in place since October 2025.
At least eight Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip on Sunday, according to hospital sources and Gaza’s Interior Ministry, in the latest deadly day since a ceasefire took effect in October 2025. Five of the dead were police officers struck in the south of the territory, and three more, including a four-year-old boy, were killed in a separate strike in Gaza City, in attacks that again tested a truce that has never fully stopped the killing.
The first and deadliest strike hit al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, an area crowded with displaced families. An Israeli drone targeted a group of police officers who were carrying out their regular duties near schools for children, according to Gaza’s Interior Ministry and a source at Nasser Hospital, causing panic among pupils nearby. Five officers were killed and several other people were wounded. The ministry named the dead as Lieutenant Colonel Muhammad Zakaria Al-Jamal, 44; Major Bassam Naamat Miqdad, 53; First Sergeant Muhammad Amin Al-Nams, 37; Police Assistant Shaher Muhammad Zaarab, 28; and Police Assistant Muhammad Ali Abu Shaar, 23.
The ministry said the officers were on duty guarding civilian infrastructure when they were hit, and local reports said the drone strike landed near the entrance to the Ard al-Manga area of al-Mawasi. That detail matters because al-Mawasi has been presented throughout the war as a displacement zone, and because the ministry says at least 75 police officers and personnel have now been killed since the ceasefire began — a figure that, if accurate, points to a pattern of strikes on the territory’s civil police rather than isolated incidents.
Hours later, or in a separate attack on the same morning, a drone strike in Gaza City killed three more people. Medical sources at al-Shifa Hospital said the dead included a father and his four-year-old son, with a third person also killed and several others wounded, some critically. Reports placed the strike on al-Thawra Street, west of Gaza City, where a drone was said to have targeted a gathering of civilians behind a shopping mall. Al Jazeera’s account placed the Gaza City deaths in the Rimal neighbourhood, reflecting the slightly different neighbourhood descriptions that often emerge in the first hours after a strike.
The Israeli military gave a brief and very different account of the southern strike. It told the AFP news agency that it was targeting “a terrorist” in southern Gaza, and, according to other reporting, claimed it had struck several Hamas members in Khan Younis, without providing further details or names. That claim could not be independently verified from the reports available on Sunday, and it does not address the Interior Ministry’s account that the five men killed in al-Mawasi were uniformed police officers on regular duties, nor the deaths in Gaza City, where no military target was identified in the reporting.
The deaths fit into a grim running total. Gaza’s Health Ministry said before Sunday’s attacks that 1,580 Palestinians had been killed and 5,711 injured since the ceasefire took effect on 10 October 2025, through airstrikes, artillery shelling and gunfire that have continued despite the truce. The ministry’s overall toll for the war since October 2023 stands at 74,594 killed, according to figures cited by Al Jazeera. Those numbers, compiled under severe strain on Gaza’s remaining hospitals, are the figures most international outlets use, while Israel disputes the ministry’s categorisation of the dead.
Sunday’s killings were not the only deadly incident in Gaza over the weekend. Two infant girls died on Saturday after a fire swept through a displacement tent in al-Mawasi, where cooking-gas shortages under the blockade have pushed families to cook over open flames inside flammable shelters. The two stories, side by side, capture the two ways civilians in Gaza are still dying more than a year after the ceasefire was supposed to bring relief: by strikes that continue despite the truce, and by the conditions of displacement itself.
The ceasefire, brokered with American involvement, was meant to stop the large-scale fighting, allow aid in and begin a political process. In practice, both sides have accused each other of violations, and the pattern since October 2025 has been one of continued Israeli strikes presented as targeting militants, continued Palestinian casualties presented by Gaza authorities as civilians and civil servants, and no agreed mechanism that has succeeded in holding either side to the terms. Sunday’s police deaths are likely to sharpen that argument, because police officers occupy an ambiguous category in the conflict: Israel has at times treated Gaza’s police as part of Hamas’s governing apparatus, while Gaza’s authorities present them as civil servants keeping order.
For families in Gaza, the immediate question is simpler and more urgent: whether the coming days bring more strikes or a renewed effort to enforce the truce. Hospitals in Khan Younis and Gaza City received the bodies and the wounded on Sunday under severe operational constraints, with medical staff working in facilities damaged by two years of war. Each new toll adds to the pressure on mediators, including the United States, Egypt and Qatar, to clarify what the ceasefire actually prohibits — and what, if anything, happens when it is broken.
What may happen next is uncertain. There was no immediate announcement on Sunday of a formal protest, a mediation initiative or a change in Israeli military policy in response to the deaths, and past experience suggests the toll will be absorbed into the wider argument about the ceasefire’s survival rather than triggering a single decisive response. But the killing of five on-duty police officers in a displacement zone, alongside a four-year-old child in Gaza City, is the kind of incident that tends to linger in that argument, cited by each side as evidence for its own account of whether the truce is holding, failing, or was never really in place at all.
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