Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli strikes across the Palestinian territory on Friday killed at least 13 people, including five in an attack that targeted a police vehicle.
Despite an October ceasefire, Gaza remains gripped by daily violence as Israeli strikes continue and both the Israeli military and Hamas accuse one another of breaking the truce.
Eight people, including a child, were killed and several others injured when an Israeli airstrike hit a police vehicle in the Al-Mawasi area of the southern city of Khan Yunis, said the civil defence agency, which operates as a rescue service under Hamas.
According to the territory’s interior ministry, two of those were police officers.In a separate incident, three people — a woman and her two children — were killed when Israeli artillery struck residential homes near Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza.
In a third attack, an Israeli aircraft struck another police patrol in Gaza City, the territory’s largest urban centre, killing two people and injuring two others, it added. The interior ministry confirmed that the two killed were police officers.
At Al-Shifa hospital, Mohammed al-Qassas, the brother of one of the dead, told AFP “the war never stopped… this is not fair”.
Gaza’s Al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals confirmed the death tolls, publishing the names of 12 of the 13 victims. The 13th victim was a 12-year-old whose identity could not immediately be confirmed. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It later published a brief statement, saying: “Earlier today (Friday), IDF troops under the Southern Command identified armed Hamas terrorists in the northern Gaza Strip, who operated adjacent to the troops and posed a threat. In order to remove the threat, the terrorists were eliminated in an aerial strike.”
At Al-Shifa hospital, an AFP journalist saw relatives of the victims weeping over the dead, with at least three bodies seen exiting from the morgue.
In Khan Yunis, an AFP photographer saw dozens of onlookers gathered around the skeleton of a burnt-out car on a dirt road in the middle of a tent camp.
Hamas condemned the “barbaric Zionist attacks that reached all parts of the Gaza Strip since this morning”, denouncing the international community’s “failure to assume responsibilities towards stopping the ongoing crimes against our people”.
The October truce has largely halted the Gaza war that began after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack.
But violence has persisted, with at least 792 Palestinians killed since the truce began, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which is under Hamas authority and whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations.
The Israeli military has reported five soldiers killed in Gaza since the start of the truce. Media restrictions and limited access in Gaza have prevented AFP from independently verifying casualty figures or freely covering the fighting.
