GAZA CITY — Six members of a Palestinian family were killed Monday when an Israeli airstrike struck the building where they had taken shelter in Gaza City, the Gaza Health Ministry confirmed, pushing the number of Palestinians killed since the October 2025 ceasefire to at least 1,144 and deepening what United Nations investigators have characterized as a genocide that shows no sign of ending.
The family died when Israeli ordnance hit their residential building in a neighborhood witnesses described as crowded with internally displaced Palestinians from other parts of the enclave. Three other people were wounded. No advance warning was given before the strike, according to accounts from Palestinian emergency workers and journalists in the area. The names of the six were not immediately released.
The deaths came as Israeli forces maintained operations across multiple areas of the strip, targeting locations in Gaza City and the northern enclave where displacement has concentrated much of Gaza’s surviving civilian population. The Health Ministry said at least 180 people were wounded across the strip in the preceding 24 hours, with medical teams extracting victims from rubble in several neighborhoods as of Monday afternoon.
Since October 7, 2023, more than 73,000 Palestinians have been confirmed killed in Gaza, according to the Health Ministry, whose figures the United Nations has described as reliable despite the catastrophic conditions under which the ministry operates. Approximately 40 percent of the confirmed dead are children, a proportion that human rights organizations and UN investigators say reflects a pattern of unlawful killing inconsistent with any recognized standard of military proportionality. Israel disputes the characterization and says its military targets Hamas combatants and infrastructure, not civilians.
The October 2025 ceasefire, brokered by Egypt and Qatar, halted fighting briefly before collapsing. Negotiations to restore it have made no progress in recent weeks. Israel has declined to accept any proposal that includes a binding commitment to a permanent end to military operations; Hamas has rejected any arrangement that falls short of such a commitment. Egyptian and Qatari mediators have not announced any resumption of formal talks, and the United States, which continues to authorize arms transfers to Israel, has not publicly demanded movement toward a long-term agreement.
For the civilians who remain in Gaza, the ceasefire’s collapse has restored the conditions of the preceding twenty-one months: daily exposure to strikes on residential areas, no functioning evacuation corridor, and a medical system systematically degraded by strike damage, supply shortfalls, and the killing of healthcare workers. The family killed Monday had, by statistical probability, already experienced at least one displacement, since internal displacement has become near-universal in Gaza, with more than 1.9 million of the enclave’s approximately 2.1 million people having been forced from their homes at some point since October 2023.
Israel this month completed a 23-kilometer earthen barrier through the center of Gaza, which independent observers say functions as a de facto partition of the enclave, further restricting the movement of civilians and complicating the delivery of humanitarian aid. The World Food Programme has said that the barrier and continued checkpoint delays have left much of northern Gaza facing acute food insecurity, compounding the effects of a blockade on fuel, medicine, and commercial goods that has persisted for more than a year.
The specific intelligence Israel says justified Monday’s strike on the residential building was not disclosed. When the Israeli military responds to media inquiries about individual strikes, it typically says it was targeting Hamas military infrastructure embedded within civilian areas, a claim that cannot be independently verified given Israel’s near-total restrictions on foreign journalist access to Gaza. International monitors have in prior investigations found that a substantial proportion of Israeli strikes have hit clearly civilian structures with no discernible military justification, a pattern the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has said strains any proportionality standard under international humanitarian law.
The International Court of Justice, where South Africa’s genocide case against Israel continues, is reviewing evidence of mass civilian casualties alongside the documented destruction of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, and water treatment facilities. The court issued provisional measures in January 2024 requiring Israel to take all possible steps to prevent acts falling within the scope of the Genocide Convention. South Africa and dozens of co-petitioners maintain that Israel has not complied. Israel disputes this and says its military campaign is conducted in accordance with international law.
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, in a report submitted to the Human Rights Council in May 2026, concluded that the evidence of genocidal intent had become overwhelming. The report cited the pattern of strikes on residential buildings, the demolition of civilian neighborhoods, the blockade of food and medicine, and public statements by senior Israeli officials as elements of a coherent campaign. Israel rejected the report as politically motivated.
Last week, Israeli strikes killed eleven people in Gaza, including three children from a single family in a southern neighborhood, drawing expressions of concern from several European governments but no concrete diplomatic consequence. The pattern has continued into this week without interruption.
Ceasefire negotiations that might end the killing remain at an impasse both sides attribute to the other’s maximalist positions. For the six people killed Monday in Gaza City, that stalemate was not an abstraction. For the hundreds of thousands still sheltering under the enclave’s remaining structures, each day without a ceasefire extends an arithmetic of loss that has now reached more than 73,000 confirmed names.
