Fadi Rajab and his 13-year-old son Abubakr died together when an Israeli air strike hit a displacement shelter in Gaza city's Zeitoun neighbourhood on Tuesday, medics said. A shelter. For people who'd already lost their homes. That's where the father and son were when the bomb came down.
They weren't alone. At least seven people were killed across Gaza that day, according to Palestinian health sources and media. A third Palestinian died in an air strike on the Ghubain family home in the Daraj neighbourhood of Gaza city. In Khan Younis, a man was killed by Israeli gunfire. In Sabra, three more people died in an air strike, the Wafa news agency reported, and a fire broke out afterward at a nearby tent camp for displaced people. The Israeli military said it had struck militants in Zeitoun and Daraj. No names, no evidence, no further details. It didn't immediately comment on Khan Younis or Sabra.
This is what a year-old, US-brokered ceasefire looks like from the ground. It took effect in October 2025, and its first anniversary has already come and gone.
The Machinery of the Truce
The ceasefire envisaged the eventual reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. Negotiators, though, haven't been able to agree on terms for Hamas to disarm or for Israel to withdraw its troops, which control about two-thirds of the territory. Residents have been ordered to leave areas under Israeli control. Two-thirds of a strip of land that was already one of the most crowded places on earth, and the people living there get told to move.
Each party to the deal tells its own story. Israel says Hamas is seeking to regroup and replenish its arsenal. Hamas says it remains committed to the ceasefire and accuses Israel of undermining it. Two armed hierarchies, each claiming the other broke the agreement, each negotiating over who gets to hold the guns and the ground. Nobody in that negotiation is asking the family in the Zeitoun shelter what they'd like.
The Body Count Ledger
The numbers don't care about the dispute. At least 1,600 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since the ceasefire took effect, according to the territory's health officials. Israel says four of its soldiers were killed during the same period. Four against 1,600. Call it a truce if you want. The arithmetic says otherwise.
The wider toll sits behind it: more than 74,000 Palestinians killed in Israel's military offensive in Gaza, according to Palestinian authorities. That offensive began after Hamas-led fighters killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. The third anniversary of that day passed last month. Every state-run institution involved has had three years to stop the killing, and none of them has managed it.
Who Gets a Seat, Who Gets Bombed
Look at who sits at the table. A US-brokered deal, negotiated between an occupying military and the armed movement that governs Gaza. The people sheltering in tents, the people whose homes carry their family names on the rubble, they're the subject of the negotiation, never its participants. Disarmament and withdrawal, the two sticking points, are questions about which organized force keeps its weapons and where it stands. Not one of them is about how ordinary people in Gaza stay alive tomorrow.
The Israeli military's statement on Tuesday followed the usual script: militants were struck, no details offered, no comment on the rest. Residents of Gaza are left to count their own dead and report them through health officials and local media, because the party doing the shooting won't do the counting.
A ceasefire is supposed to be the thing that lets people stop running. In Zeitoun, a father and his 13-year-old son were in a shelter, doing exactly what the war had left them to do, and the air strike found them anyway. The talks over who disarms and who withdraws will go on. Abubakr Rajab won't.
- gaza
- israel
- hamas
- ceasefire
- air strike
- palestinians
- zeitoun
- israeli military