Updates: Hamas-Israel ceasefire holds

Israeli air strikes across Gaza on Saturday killed at least 24 Palestinians, including children, and wounded 87 others in what authorities in the enclave said was another breach of the six-week ceasefire, Al Jazeera reported.

Witnesses said the first strike hit a car in northern Gaza City, with further attacks following in central Deir el-Balah and the Nuseirat refugee camp. A drone strike in Gaza City’s Remal neighbourhood killed at least 11 people and injured 20 more, according to al-Shifa Hospital’s managing director, Rami Mhanna.

In Deir el-Balah, three people, including a woman, were killed when a house was struck. A witness said the blast caused a “powerful explosion”.

As the attacks unfolded, Hamas accused Israel of violating the truce “under fabricated pretexts” and called on mediators — the US, Egypt and Qatar — to intervene. The group said Israeli forces had moved west of the designated yellow line, altering the boundary set under the deal.

Hamas urged mediators to act “urgently” and pressed the US to uphold its commitments. A senior Hamas official also rejected a report on Al Arabiya claiming the group had called off the ceasefire.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office accused Hamas of violating the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, and claimed that in response, Israeli forces had killed five senior Hamas members.

Hamas violated the ceasefire again, sending its soldiers into Israeli-held territory to attack IDF soldiers. In response, Israel eliminated them, Netanyahu office said, referring to areas behind the so-called Yellow Line within Gaza, to which Israeli forces have withdrawn.

"Israel has fully honoured the ceasefire, Hamas has not... We again call on the mediators to insist that Hamas fulfill its side of the ceasefire," the statement alleged.

Gaza’s civil defence agency said 21 people were killed and dozens more wounded in multiple Israeli air strikes on the Palestinian territory on Saturday.

Mahmud Bassal, spokesman for the agency which operates under Hamas authority, told AFP there were "21 martyrs this evening in five separate Israeli air strikes, in a clear violation of the ceasefire in Gaza".

Gaza’s civil defence agency said seven people were killed in three Israeli air strikes on the Palestinian territory on Saturday.

A spokesman for the agency, which operates under Hamas authority, said three people were killed in a strike on a car in the Gaza City area, three were killed in another on a house in Deir al-Balah, and one was killed in a third strike in the Nuseirat area.

The Palestinian Health Ministry shared the post-ceasefire death toll in Palestine, saying after the arrival of seven more bodies across hospitals in the Strip, the total count rises to 318 since the Trump-brokered ceasefire on October 10, Al Jazeera reported. 

In a statement, the ministry said 30 people were also wounded in the last two days, bringing the total injuries since the ceasefire to 788.

Numerous victims remain trapped under rubble and in streets where ambulance and civil defense teams cannot reach them, the ministry said.

A civil society forum examining alleged Israeli war crimes in Palestine has opened in Barcelona under the banner of the International People’s Tribunal on Palestine, Al Jazeera reported.

The two-day tribunal aims to probe crimes it accuses Israel and its supporters of committing, drawing on testimony from witnesses and experts.

Organised by the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, the International People’s Front and the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty, the forum says it will present evidence from “key witnesses and experts” to expose what it calls the “genocidal use of ecocide and forced starvation” against Palestinians by the “Zionist occupation”.

It also says it seeks to highlight what it describes as the complicit role of the United States and other backers of the occupation, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany and others, as well as “so-called private entities like the US and Zionist-led Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”.

More than 200 makeshift displacement sites sheltering hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza face a severe risk of flooding this winter, Al Jazeera reported, citing the latest United Nations humanitarian assessment.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the occupied Palestinian territory, 214 active sites have been identified as being at particularly high risk because of their locations and poor conditions.

• Search operations for the remains of numerous missing Gaza residents will start Saturday in Maghazi camp, with assistance from the Red Cross, Egypt’s committee, and local police, the Palestinian Civil Defence announced.
• Despite the temporary ceasefire, Israeli forces conducted multiple lethal strikes in Gaza yesterday, including a drone attack in Beit Lahiya that left four children wounded, Wafa reported.
• The Israeli military said it had eliminated six Palestinian militants and detained five others who emerged from tunnel openings in Rafah, east of the yellow line.
• Israel carried out an additional fatal strike in southern Lebanon, targeting a vehicle in the Bint Jbeil area and killing one occupant.
• According to the UN World Food Programme, access to food in Gaza has seen some improvement during the ceasefire but remains inadequate, with only 30% of planned food parcel deliveries achieved.
• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his rejection of Palestinian statehood, stating plainly that such a state “will not exist.”

At least 67 Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza even after the so-called ceasefire took hold, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday, calling the deaths a devastating reminder of how fragile and uneven the pause in fighting has been.

Speaking at a news conference in Geneva, Unicef spokesperson Ricardo Pires said the tally includes a baby girl killed in an Israeli air strike on a home in Khan Younis on Thursday. The count also covers seven other children killed the previous day as Israeli attacks continued across the enclave.

“This is during an agreed ceasefire. The pattern is staggering,” Pires told reporters, referring to the deaths recorded since October 11 — the first full day of the US-brokered truce between Israel and Hamas.

He stressed that the toll is not abstract or distant. “As we have repeated many times, these are not statistics: Each was a child with a family, a dream, a life – suddenly cut short by continued violence.”

Unicef has repeatedly warned that children remain the most exposed in Gaza. The agency estimated last month that 64,000 children have been killed and injured in Israeli attacks since the war erupted in October 2023.