New York — The bombardment began again before dawn. By midday Friday, rescue teams in central and northern Gaza were dragging bodies from pulverized homes as Israeli jets and artillery renewed strikes across the enclave. Local health authorities said dozens were killed and many more wounded, a grim arithmetic that resumed with a speed and ferocity familiar after nearly two years of war.
The blasts echoed through Gaza City and the central towns of Nuseirat and Deir al-Balah. Survivors spoke of collapsing stairwells, of children missing beneath slabs of concrete, of neighbors who could not be reached because streets were newly cratered. Ambulances struggled to thread through alleys choked with rubble and tangled wire. The smell of dust and burning plastic hung low in the heat.
Friday’s assault unfolded as world leaders traded speeches in New York and diplomats argued over a path to stop the fighting. The distance between the rostrum and the ruins was measured not in miles but in credibility. In Gaza, there was no debate over what was happening. Families raced from one flattened block to the next, searching for relatives, and hospitals again declared mass-casualty incidents.
Israel’s military described the renewed strikes as part of an ongoing campaign to dismantle Hamas in its last redoubts. For residents inside the strip, the campaign has become a grinding routine, a fresh set of evacuation orders, another neighborhood marked as a danger zone, and then the concussive thud of detonations that wipe out kitchens, stairwells, and the thin walls where children tape their drawings.
By late afternoon, smoke columns marked at least a half-dozen impact sites across central Gaza. In Nuseirat, people formed bucket brigades to clear dust from the mouths of those pulled from basements. In Gaza City’s shattered districts, men stood on the edges of newly opened pits, calling names into the grey. A mother in Deir al-Balah cradled a toddler streaked with blood and dust as nurses pushed past with oxygen tanks.
The day’s death toll added to totals already beyond comprehension. Local authorities say more than 65,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, a figure that includes women, children, medics, and journalists. The number is a blunt ledger of air and artillery power applied to one of the world’s most densely populated places. It rises in jumps, plateauing only when the guns pause, then climbing again when operations resume. Reporting across the past months has tracked a deadly toll alongside famine risk.
Those who survive face a different battle. Hunger has become a permanent front line. The main aid artery into the north, a coastal crossing used to shuttle food and fuel, has been closed for days, choking off what little regular supply kept communal kitchens boiling. Field clinics have shuttered for lack of diesel and medicine. Parents now trade packets of baby formula at prices that would have been unthinkable a year ago, if they can find them at all.
Humanitarian officers describe a cascading failure. When fuel stalls, water pumps stop. When water stops, diarrhea and dehydration surge in the camps. When food trucks do not arrive, the malnourished decline quickly, and children with already weakened immune systems tip into starvation. Aid coordinators warn that the line between severe food insecurity and famine is no longer academic in the north. It is visible in sunken cheeks and listless eyes.
At shelters in the center of the strip, those who fled Gaza City months ago say they are weighing yet another displacement. They have been told to move repeatedly, each time deeper into the strip’s shrinking safe zones, each time to tents made from tarps and salvaged wood, each time a little more resigned. They count survival in weeks, then in days, then in hours after a new leaflets-drop.
Hospitals, already carved up by earlier strikes and raids, continue to operate in fragments. Operating rooms without sterile supplies, emergency departments without blood, neonatal wards warmed by improvised heaters. Some facilities have reopened in partial form. Others function as triage points, stabilizing patients long enough to send them farther south on roads pocked by shelling. Doctors describe performing amputations with anesthetics rationed to the milliliter.
Against this backdrop, Washington’s promise of a breakthrough returned to the stage. Before leaving for meetings with the Israeli leader, the US president said he believed a deal to end the war and free remaining captives was close. The outline, according to officials and diplomats, includes staged releases of detainees and hostages, a halt to Israeli attacks, and an effort to rebuild a devastated strip under an arrangement that would keep Hamas from rearming while giving Palestinians a say over their future. In New York, the rhetoric followed the beats of earlier addresses as the US line at the UN emphasized urgency.
Such assurances have traveled a long road across this conflict. Variations of ceasefire frameworks have come and gone. A winter armistice brought exchanges and a fleeting quiet, then collapsed under the weight of mistrust, domestic politics in Israel, and a battlefield logic that has favored escalation over restraint. Mediation teams in Doha and Cairo have spent months shuttling proposals and counterproposals, while families of captives in Israel and families of detainees in the West Bank have paced outside government buildings demanding action.
The numbers at the center of the bargaining remain stark. Israeli authorities say dozens of hostages are still in Gaza, some believed alive, others presumed dead. Hamas wants prisoners released in exchange, including those serving long sentences. Both sides have leaked partial lists and hard lines. Between them, mediators insist, there is still a narrow space where a deal can be forged, but each new strike narrows it further.
At the United Nations General Assembly, the Israeli prime minister used his address to pledge that Israel would finish the job in Gaza, a phrase that has become a banner for a campaign that now spans two years and multiple major assaults. As he entered the hall, scores of diplomats walked out, a visible rebuke that reflected a widening diplomatic isolation even among countries that long counted themselves as Israel’s partners.
The walkout, coordinated in part by Arab and Muslim-majority delegations and joined by some European representatives, was a signal that language about surgical operations and precision strikes has lost its audience. It was also a sign that recognitions of Palestinian statehood by a cluster of Western capitals in recent days were not symbolic flourishes but an attempt to mark a new baseline for diplomacy after the war.
Israel’s leadership rejects that premise, arguing that recognition rewards an armed group that still fires rockets and holds captives. The government’s critics counter that recognition is a statement about people rather than parties, a way to establish a diplomatic scaffolding for a future that cannot be built in the middle of an air raid. In Gaza, such debates might as well be conducted on another planet. People there are worried about the next hour.
Even far from Gaza, the fighting’s edges are jagged. In Yemen, where a local armed movement aligned with Iran has launched drones and missiles toward Israel and into the Red Sea, Israeli strikes have escalated, leaving residents of the capital surveying rows of collapsed apartments and a newsroom reduced to rubble. Coverage from the region has traced how Israeli strikes have escalated in Sanaa. In the Mediterranean, small boats bearing activists have set sail for Gaza in a bid to challenge the blockade, a symbolic gesture that nevertheless captures the sense of a world that has tired of statements and is searching for leverage. One such aid flotilla defied the blockade and became a rallying point for solidarity groups.
Inside the occupied West Bank, raids and settler incursions have continued to grind at an already pressured population. The reopening of a key crossing to Jordan for passenger travel offers little relief to towns that see nightly arrests and sporadic gunfire. Merchants complain that commerce has withered under closures and fear, and parents send children to school with instructions on what to do if tear gas drifts through their neighborhood. Earlier months brought a surge in settler violence that deepened a pervasive sense of insecurity.
For humanitarian agencies, Friday was another day to recalculate the possible. Could convoys be rerouted through secondary roads if the coastal link stays shut. Could desalination plants be restarted if even a limited fuel allotment is cleared. Could a narrow window be secured to deliver high-nutrient supplements to clinics overwhelmed by malnourished children who are slipping below survival thresholds.
The answers depend on permissions and security guarantees that have proven fragile. The system of deconfliction, under which agencies notify the military of their routes and schedules, has frayed. Drivers say they now factor into their planning the time it takes to wait out red periods when shelling spikes, and the wild-card risk that a single strike will crater the only route in or out of a district.
At a clinic in the south, a nurse stared at a refrigerator that should have been stocked with vaccines and antibiotics and now held only a few vials. He had a list of names of children due for follow-up. He had a generator that coughed and sputtered when the diesel ran low. He had a stack of ration forms for families who were supposed to receive staples that never arrived. He asked how long this would go on. No one could answer.
In New York, the choreography continued. Delegations met on the margins to exchange talking points. A handful of countries pushed for a resolution to protect aid routes, one that would be difficult to enforce without an on-the-ground mechanism. Lawmakers in allied capitals debated conditioning arms transfers. Legal teams in The Hague and elsewhere refined cases that accuse Israel of grave breaches of international law, while Israeli officials accused their accusers of ignoring Hamas’s crimes. Past filings show how legal challenges have gathered pace even as the war ground on.
The language of accountability has become a drumbeat beneath the war’s daily tragedies. In Israel, families of those killed on October 7 and of those still missing demand a full accounting from a government that promised security and delivered calamity. In Gaza, people mourn a succession of dead and ask whether anyone will be held responsible for the choices that targeted neighborhoods and cut off food and fuel to a population that cannot leave.
The United States, which has both shielded Israel at the Security Council and tried to midwife a ceasefire, now argues that the war has run its course. The White House insists that it is ready to underwrite a political horizon that includes a demilitarized Gaza under a reformed Palestinian administration, reconstruction funds and monitoring teams, and a path back to talks on statehood once the guns go silent. Europe’s capitals have debated whether pressure should extend to trade and technology. Proposals that threaten Israeli trade privileges are no longer confined to fringe parties.
Across Gaza, Friday ended as so many days have, with families gathered under tarps, with a pot of thin soup, with phones held up to find a signal that flickers in and out. People traded news of who had made it through the day and who had not. They counted the minutes until the next bombardment. They listed the names of those still missing and the deadlines by which the bodies needed to be found before the heat made recovery impossible.
In one camp, a teacher who once ran a classroom for third-graders now works as a volunteer counselor. She teaches breathing exercises to children who flinch at loud noises and draws maps of imagined homes where there is running water and a lock on the door. She tells them stories about planting lemon trees that take years to bear fruit. She says there will be a time to plant again.
Whether the promised deal to end the war emerges in the coming days or dissolves like others before it will depend on a series of decisions taken far from the camps where people wait. The terms will be parsed by lawyers and argued over by coalition partners. They will be measured by grieving families against the names of those returned and those who are not. And they will be judged in Gaza by a metric that does not appear in diplomatic annexes, whether the bombing stops.
If a ceasefire holds, it will have to be more than a pause. Aid must move at scale. Fuel must reach water plants before the next diarrhea wave. Schools must reopen in buildings that have not been mined or shelled. A process that gives Palestinians a political horizon must begin quickly, or else the lull will feel like an intermission before the next act. If it fails, the costs will be counted again in the quiet that follows the last blast of a day, when people in Gaza do what people everywhere do in the minutes before sleep. They take stock. They whisper the names of those they love. They hope morning comes. As aid planners warn, aid must move at scale or the suffering will deepen.
Key facts and developments referenced in this report are supported by on-the-record materials and major outlets, including an assessment that a Gaza ceasefire deal was near as reported by Reuters, confirmation of a temporary closure of the coastal aid route near Zikim via Reuters, live developments from the ground through the Al Jazeera liveblog, health system conditions and facility access reported by the UNRWA situation report and hospital impact coverage in the Washington Post, humanitarian baselines from UN OCHA and emergency food needs at the WFP Palestine emergency, child malnutrition warnings by UNICEF, documentation of regional spillover in Yemen by the Associated Press, and case filings at the International Court of Justice.
