The Israeli military launched drone strikes and opened fire across the Gaza Strip on Sunday, killing at least five Palestinians including a nine-year-old child, Al Jazeera reported. Citing local health authorities and emergency medics, Reuters and the Associated Press confirmed that the latest fatal assaults directly breached the ongoing United States-brokered truce established last October. Although large-scale ground hostilities have reduced since the agreement, daily aerial campaigns by Israeli forces continue to claim civilian lives across the besieged enclave.
A targeted Israeli drone strike struck a blacksmith workshop in the Sabra neighborhood of southern Gaza City, killing four Palestinians and injuring several others. Officials at the al-Shifa hospital, where the victims were transferred, stated that the bodies arrived severely dismembered due to the impact of multiple missiles. The Israeli military formally acknowledged the operation in the area, claiming it successfully targeted active terrorist infrastructure, though local eyewitnesses disputed the assertion and confirmed the site was a standard civilian workshop.
In a separate incident in central Gaza, a nine-year-old girl named Tala Abu Matar was killed when Israeli troops directed heavy gunfire toward a displacement camp. Medics operating near the eastern edge of the Al-Bureij refugee camp reported that the child succumbed to critical bullet wounds sustained while inside a makeshift tent city. Medical sources also confirmed that two other Palestinian men died on Sunday from severe injuries suffered during previous Israeli attacks in Khan Younis and Al-Bureij earlier in the week.
The continuous military operations represent a major violation of the peace plan signed by Israel and Hamas on October 9, 2025, which went into effect the following day. Data compiled by the Gaza Health Ministry reveals that since the official implementation of the truce, persistent Israeli attacks have killed 1,098 Palestinians and wounded more than 3,535 others. Palestinian government officials stated that Israel has steadily expanded its operational control beyond the agreed territorial lines, now occupying nearly 80 percent of the total land mass within the Gaza Strip.
What remains unclear is how the ongoing violence will impact high-level diplomatic talks currently taking place in Cairo to implement the next stage of the peace framework. Hamas leaders arrived in the Egyptian capital this weekend for negotiations focused on the potential disarmament of Palestinian factions and the total withdrawal of the Israeli army from urban sectors. The current diplomatic impasse persists as the total death toll from the full-scale conflict since October 2023 has now surpassed 73,118 Palestinians, according to official medical registries.
