Israeli Strikes Kill Five in Gaza, Including a Nine-Year-Old
Israeli strikes killed at least five Palestinians across Gaza on Sunday, including a nine-year-old girl killed by gunfire at a displacement camp and four people in a drone strike on a workshop in Gaza City. The near-daily killings continue nine months into a ceasefire under which more than a thousand Palestinians have died, as talks in Cairo on Hamas’s disarmament and a full Israeli withdrawal remain deadlocked and Israel holds close to 70% of the territory.
The Gaza ceasefire is a ceasefire only in the sense that the full-scale assault has stopped; the dying has not, and the political process meant to follow it has stalled. Israel’s steady expansion of the area it controls, along shifting lines the army calls a plan to encircle Hamas, has hardened into something close to de facto control, while the talks that were supposed to deliver disarmament, withdrawal and a new governing authority have gone nowhere. The daily toll — a child at a camp, workers at a shop — is the grinding cost of that stalemate, largely out of the world’s eye as the Gulf burns. The stalled Trump plan remains the missing keystone, and without it the lines simply harden and the strikes continue. Watch whether the Cairo talks produce anything, and whether the wider regional war pulls Gaza back into or further from the world’s attention.