ISRAELI warplanes bombed the home of the Al-Masri family in the Sabra neighbourhood of Gaza City at around 2am last Tuesday, killing Firas and Salsabeel al-Masri and their four children, Faryal, Salma, Amira and Naim, as they slept.
The strike came without warning. It tore off the upper floor of the modest two-storey house and set the building alight. Hours later the shell of it was still smouldering.
‘We were asleep in the middle of the night, at around 2am or so, when we heard a huge explosion,’ said Abu Youssef Al-Masri, the children’s grandfather, standing in front of the partly collapsed house.
‘We realised the house had been struck. The house collapsed and caught fire.’
Nothing inside survived. Belongings burnt to ash lay among broken cinder blocks, and the walls left standing were black with soot.
Mohammed Al-Masri, brother of Firas,said: ‘The house burned completely. It was my brother’s home, he, his wife, and their four children. Burned until it was charred.
‘My brother’s entire family has been erased,’ he said.
‘They burned before our eyes and we couldn’t do anything.’ He was speaking at the graveyard where all six were buried last Tuesday afternoon.
Relatives carried the bodies, wrapped in white shrouds, through the rubble of the cemetery.
Abu Youssef stood among the shallow graves and laid the small body of his granddaughter Amira beside her mother while Israeli drones circled overhead.
‘The whole world is watching us,’ Mohammed said. ‘There is no ceasefire in effect, the war hasn’t stopped, and no one cares about us.’
The killings came during days of intensified Israeli attacks across the Strip, mounted while international attention has been fixed on the renewed US war with Iran.
Airstrikes, shelling, quadcopter attacks and shootings have hit residential buildings, tent encampments, civilian vehicles, a funeral procession, a police station and a hospital being used as a shelter, killing dozens of Palestinians in the past week alone.
Ground troops have pushed further in, moving the ‘yellow line’ westward, taking more land and squeezing the population into an ever smaller area.
Since the ceasefire took effect in October 2025, 1,180 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, among them more than 250 children, with 127 killed in the first three weeks of July and more than 3,800 wounded.
The recorded toll since Israel began its genocidal assault in October 2023 stands at more than 73,300 killed and close to 174,000 wounded, according to the health ministry in Gaza.
Last Monday, a strike hit the Al-Yemen Al-Saeed Hospital building in Jabaliya refugee camp, killing at least four people and wounding several others.
The hospital stopped functioning during the war and has served since mainly as a shelter for displaced families.
‘I went out to visit my friend near Al-Yemen Al-Saeed and suddenly there was a very large explosion, two consecutive explosions,’ said Youssef Akasha, who was a few metres away and later stood outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City as the dead and wounded arrived.
Bloodied children were lifted from ambulances, bodies wrapped in blankets laid on gurneys. ‘The children were having fun, playing football, and suddenly they started screaming. We went directly to Al-Yemen Al-Saeed … we found the place destroyed and children were lying on the ground, women screaming, and men running to rescue the wounded.’
On Friday, Israeli forces bombed a funeral procession outside the Ahmed Yassin Mosque in Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, killing at least eight mourners who had gathered to bury a man killed hours earlier. Bodies lay on the blood-soaked ground.
One man was blown in half, his legs torn from his body, as people screamed in the street and tried to reach the wounded.
At Al-Awda hospital wounded children lay silent and wide-eyed while doctors worked. One man knelt over a bloodied corpse on a gurney and would not let go.
‘It was a very big attack and there was a large number of martyrs,’ said Medhat Saleh, who was wounded in the right arm.
‘We couldn’t have imagined they would bomb a funeral of this size. Many children, women, and men … A massacre in every sense of the word. The people were piled on top of each other, torn apart.’
He added: ‘It’s gotten much, much worse. In recent days, this has become a daily occurrence.’
Thameen Al-Kheetan, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said on Tuesday: ‘The Israeli military has intensified its attacks in Gaza in recent days, killing and injuring dozens of Palestinians, children, women and men … Nine months after the announcement of a ceasefire, still, nowhere is safe for Palestinians in Gaza.’
The UN has documented 57 Palestinians killed between 13th and 20th July.
He went on: ‘Meanwhile, the Palestinian population in Gaza remains trapped in an ever-shrinking area, with the “yellow line” constantly being moved westwards by the Israeli occupying power, presenting a continuous threat to life as the Israeli military appears to routinely fire on Palestinians for mere presence in the vicinity of that line …
‘The violations, the suffering and the misery that continue to be imposed on the Palestinians in Gaza cannot be ignored.’
Under the October 2025 agreement, Israeli troops pulled back to the yellow line, a boundary running roughly parallel to the coast that cuts off large stretches of northern and southern Gaza and left Israel holding 53 per cent of the territory.
That was meant to be the first stage of a phased withdrawal to a buffer zone at the border.
Instead the military has spent nine months edging westward, taking more Palestinian land and setting yellow concrete blocks down to mark its new line of control, which Israeli military officials now put closer to 70 per cent of the Strip.
‘It’s not simply that the resumption of the war in Iran provides cover, it’s also the fact that the war has largely been a failure from an Israeli perspective, and the Israeli state will look to compensate for this failure elsewhere before a new regional balance takes shape,’ said Nasser Abourahme, professor of Middle Eastern and North African studies at Bowdoin College.
‘It’s most important to remember that the genocide itself has both stalled and never stopped.
‘For all the horrific and unprecedented destruction and death, Israel hasn’t yet achieved any of its core aims: The ethnic cleansing of the Strip, the disarming of the resistance factions, or the resettlement of the Strip.’
He added: ‘The escalation of the killing, the expansion of the so-called yellow line in new land grabs, and the agitation of politicians and the settler movement for renewed Jewish settlement in Gaza all point to the fact that Israel’s end game remains the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and its full conquest one way or another.
‘At the end of the day, the so-called ceasefire didn’t stop the genocide, it only modulated its tempo and intensity.’
For several days Israeli ground forces have attacked the area around the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City, bombing from the air, shooting and shelling, razing land with bulldozers and issuing displacement orders that forced residents out of their homes and shelters.
‘Today, they moved the yellow line here. The day before, they bombed the area, so we left. We spent one more night at home, then we had to leave,’ said Umm Salem Dawla, displaced from the area.
‘We gathered our belongings and left them at the camp. I keep saying I’ll go and sit by the cemetery. What can I tell you? What kind of life is this?’
The troops withdrew last Wednesday, and residents found yellow concrete blocks set down at the Dawlah junction on Salah al-Din street, the main north to south road running the length of the enclave.
The blocks cut Palestinians in that part of Gaza City off from the road and from everything south of it.
Assem Dawla, another displaced resident of Zeitoun sid: ‘The Israelis started shelling the area, tanks started firing at us and at our home so we fled because the situation was extremely difficult … the tanks are always visible in the street, firing at our homes, and the quadcopters are constantly overhead.
‘They don’t leave us alone. Twenty four hours a day there is shelling and gunfire,’ he said.
‘As you can see, we’re now taking out our belongings and leaving because the occupation has advanced the yellow line to Salah al-Din street.
‘There is no longer any possibility of life here. Life in Zeitoun has been wiped out. There is no hope left and no way to live here anymore.
‘My fear is that all of Gaza will end up inside the occupation’s new boundaries.
‘Netanyahu is now talking about taking 67% to 70% of the Gaza Strip, but I believe he wants to control all of it.
‘There won’t be anywhere left for us. We’ll all be living under the control and domination of the Israeli army,’ he said.
‘The war is not over. We’re still living in a state of fear, greater even than when the war was ongoing.’
