Israeli air strikes and gunfire killed at least nine Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, including a ten-year-old boy and a senior Hamas police officer, according to health officials and police sources. The deaths add to a mounting toll since a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect last October — a truce that halted large-scale combat but has not stopped near-daily violence that has now claimed more than 1,100 Palestinian lives, alongside four Israeli soldiers killed in Palestinian attacks over the same period.
In the most deadly single incident, an Israeli drone fired four missiles at a police post near a busy market in Jabalia, a densely populated area in northern Gaza, killing at least seven people and wounding several others. Hamas's interior ministry identified one of those killed as Colonel Mohammed Marwan Salem, the head of the local Jabalia police station, along with several other officers. The Israeli military offered a different characterisation, describing Salem as the head of military security for Hamas's Central Jabalia Battalion and labelling the others killed as "terrorists". Relatives of at least one of the dead pushed back on that framing. "He was on duty — part of the civilian police force — patrolling the Fallujah roundabout in a civilian vehicle when he was targeted by surveillance aircraft," Mohammed Moussa, the uncle of another officer killed in the strike, told reporters. "I want to understand: what was the purpose of targeting him?" Police sources say Israel has intensified strikes on Hamas security personnel since October, killing dozens of officers in that period.
In southern Gaza, a ten-year-old boy named Muataz Abu Shaar was shot dead by Israeli fire in Rafah, according to medics. His aunt, Suzan Abu Shaar, said he had been sitting in a tent changing clothes when he was struck. "Wherever we go, there is no safety," she said. "We want them to stop these massacres. We want them to stop the war." A separate air strike in the Khan Younis area killed a 36-year-old man and wounded three others; the Israeli military confirmed that strike, saying it had targeted a Hamas operative, but did not comment on the Rafah or Jabalia incidents.
The bloodshed comes against the backdrop of broader humanitarian collapse and fragile diplomacy. Hamas leaders were in Cairo on Tuesday for talks on implementing the second phase of a US-backed peace plan proposed by President Donald Trump, which includes discussion of Hamas disarmament and an Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza. Negotiators described little concrete progress in recent weeks, with Hamas citing Israeli ceasefire violations as a fundamental obstacle to any agreement. Israel, for its part, wants Hamas to relinquish control of Gaza and disarm — conditions the group has resisted despite signalling openness to stepping back from governance.
Since the start of Israel's military campaign following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023 — in which around 1,200 people were killed in Israel and 251 taken hostage — Gaza's health ministry says more than 73,230 Palestinians have been killed in total, with hundreds of thousands more wounded. Nearly all of Gaza's approximately two million residents have been displaced, many of them multiple times, and now live along a narrow coastal strip in makeshift tents or damaged buildings. The violence on Tuesday is part of what observers describe as a grinding, low-intensity continuation of the war — one that persists even as diplomats seek a formal end to the conflict.