ISRAELI forces have killed at least seven Palestinians across the Gaza Strip since Sunday in continued violation of the October ceasefire.
Five were killed yesterday morning when Israeli aircraft bombed a group of residents in Al Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza.
Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem said the escalation of extermination operations demonstrated Israel’s contempt for every mediator and guarantor state involved in the truce, describing the attack as ‘a new massacre’ and saying the army was ‘continuing the genocide against the people of Gaza and violating the ceasefire’.
Qassem said the Peace Council bore part of the responsibility ‘due to its incapacity, silence, and adoption of the Israeli position’, and added that carrying out the killings on the Day of Arafah further exposed ‘Israel’s racist reality and its disregard for the feelings of Muslims and their religious institutions’.
On Monday, Ahmed Samir Farhat died of wounds sustained two days earlier in a strike on Al-Mawasi in Khan Younis, and another civilian was wounded when Israeli forces shelled a house in Al-Maghazi. Hours later, a strike on a tent in Al-Mawasi killed a woman and a young girl and injured 17 others, mostly children.
By Monday evening, Israeli warplanes had bombed a residential block in al-Nuseirat refugee camp after ordering several families to evacuate; Al-Awda Hospital received four wounded from strikes on Block 5.
Since the ceasefire came into force, 905 Palestinians have been killed and 2,713 wounded by Israeli fire, with 777 bodies recovered from beneath the rubble, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
The cumulative toll since 7th October 2023 stands at 72,797 killed and 172,821 wounded. An unknown number of victims remain trapped under collapsed buildings and on roadsides, beyond the reach of ambulance and civil defence teams.
The scale of those still missing was set out on Monday by the Palestinian Centre for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared, which launched a correspondence campaign to MEPs and international human rights organisations to mark International Missing Children’s Day on 25 May.
The Centre said around 2,900 children in Gaza are missing or forcibly disappeared, of whom an estimated 2,700 are still trapped beneath the rubble, unreached because of shortages of equipment, restrictions on fuel, attacks on rescue teams, and the continued presence of Israeli forces in the affected areas.
The figure forms part of a wider total of roughly 7,000 missing persons across the Strip, alongside 21,510 children confirmed killed.
Contact has been lost with around 200 children, with researchers documenting cases in which children were taken by Israeli forces and then disappeared, with no disclosure of their fate or place of detention.
Many of these disappearances clustered around aid distribution points and zones under Israeli military control, with documented cases showing children had gone to aid points, tried to obtain flour from high-risk areas during periods of extreme hunger, collected firewood, or returned to destroyed homes to retrieve belongings.
The Centre said the abandonment of thousands of children’s bodies beneath the rubble was ‘a compounded violation of human dignity’, warning that the absence of serious international measures to recover the dead and trace the missing only entrenched Israel’s impunity.
It called on European parliamentarians to press for binding mechanisms to compel the Israeli authorities to disclose the names, locations, and health conditions of detained children, and to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross immediate access.
The Government Media Office in Gaza, meanwhile, warned of an unprecedented escalation in the humanitarian catastrophe ahead of Eid al-Adha.
Available supplies no longer meet even minimum humanitarian needs as poverty spreads, displacement grows, and local production collapses.
Under the ceasefire terms, 600 trucks were to enter Gaza each day, including 50 carrying fuel; only 37 per cent of that figure has been admitted, and fuel deliveries have not exceeded 14 per cent. Over the past week, only 1,196 trucks entered out of an expected 4,200.
