At least four Palestinians killed in Gaza as Israeli attacks continue despite year-old ceasefire
Israeli attacks across Gaza on Saturday killed at least four Palestinians, including a teacher shelled in the Nuseirat refugee camp, Gaza health officials and hospitals said, taking the toll since the October 2025 ceasefire past 1,580.
At least four Palestinians were killed in Gaza on Saturday as Israeli attacks continued across the enclave, despite a ceasefire that has nominally been in place for more than a year, according to Gaza's health officials and hospitals. The deaths underline how fragile the truce has become, with strikes, shelling and fatal injuries from earlier attacks still being recorded almost daily.
The most clearly documented of Saturday's killings took place in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, where shelling killed a Palestinian teacher, Diaa Abu al-Rous. His death was confirmed by al-Awda Hospital, which serves the camp area. Nuseirat, one of Gaza's most crowded refugee camps, has repeatedly been hit during the war, and its residents have endured repeated displacement and bombardment even after the ceasefire was declared.
A second man, Arafat al-Arair, died on Saturday from serious injuries sustained days earlier when Israel struck a vehicle in the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood, southwest of Gaza City. A medical source at al-Shifa Hospital confirmed his death. His case illustrates a grim feature of the casualty count: the toll from any given day keeps rising afterwards, as people wounded in earlier strikes succumb to their injuries in hospitals struggling with shortages of medicine, equipment and power.
Two girls also died on Saturday from injuries sustained the previous evening, when their tent caught fire at a camp for displaced people in al-Mawasi, in the Khan Younis area of southern Gaza. Nasser Medical Complex confirmed their deaths. It was not clear what caused the fire, and the girls' deaths are a reminder that for Gaza's displaced families, danger does not come only from strikes: hundreds of thousands of people are still living in tents and makeshift shelters as winter approaches, exposed to fire, cold and disease.
Taken together, the four deaths form part of a wider pattern. Gaza's Ministry of Health said at least six Palestinians were killed across the enclave over the past 48 hours, with another 26 injured, in its daily statistical report on Saturday. Since the ceasefire came into effect in October 2025, the ministry says, at least 1,580 Palestinians have been killed and 5,711 injured — figures that have steadily climbed even though the agreement was supposed to end the fighting.
The United Nations human rights office added its voice on Friday, warning that Israeli forces in Gaza were continuing to displace Palestinians and that their actions continued to raise serious concerns. The warning came amid reports of ongoing demolitions, evacuations and strikes in areas that Israel has designated as under its control, and it reflects a growing international unease that the ceasefire exists more on paper than on the ground.
Israel, for its part, says the Hamas militant group has been rearming and launching attacks in violation of the year-old ceasefire, and it has stepped up strikes against the group in recent weeks. Israeli officials also point to their own losses, saying four soldiers have been killed since the ceasefire began. The two sides thus continue to trade blame for the truce's erosion, each presenting its own actions as responses to the other's violations.
The broader context is a war that has already devastated Gaza. Palestinian authorities say more than 74,000 people have been killed in Israel's assault on the enclave, launched after Hamas-led fighters killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel on 7 October 2023 and took 251 hostage. Even after the ceasefire, much of Gaza remains in ruins, with homes, hospitals, schools and water and sewage systems destroyed, and reconstruction barely begun.
For the families of Saturday's victims, the political arguments over who broke the ceasefire first matter less than the fact of the losses themselves: a teacher killed by shelling in a refugee camp, a man dying days after a vehicle strike, and two girls who did not survive a night in a tent. Their deaths will be added to a casualty list that grows even in what is supposed to be peacetime.
What happens next depends on whether the ceasefire's guarantors can arrest the slide. Mediators have repeatedly warned that continued killings risk collapsing the agreement altogether, which would return Gaza to full-scale war. Without a renewed effort to enforce the truce, protect civilians and move towards reconstruction, Saturday's toll is likely to be repeated — and the gap between the ceasefire's promise and Gaza's reality will keep widening.
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