Israeli drone attacks killed at least six Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Saturday, according to Palestinian medical and emergency workers reported by Al Jazeera — a year into a "ceasefire" under which the killing has never stopped. The strikes hit northern, central and southern Gaza on the same day Gaza's Health Ministry raised the toll since the United States-brokered ceasefire was announced on October 10, 2025 to 1,511 Palestinians killed and 5,375 injured. In an update covering the preceding 48 hours, the ministry reported six deaths and 43 injuries across the Strip, and put the overall toll since October 2023 at 74,469 killed and 175,492 injured.
What happened on Saturday?
The dead were reported from five locations, from Jabalia in the north to Rafah in the south. A Palestinian man was killed and several others wounded when an Israeli drone struck a group of civilians near al-Faluja cemetery, west of Jabalia, the Palestinian Wafa news agency reported, citing medical sources. One Palestinian was killed and several injured in a drone strike on the al-Mawasi area of Rafah, Wafa said. Earlier, two people were killed and others wounded in an attack in the Tuffah neighbourhood of northeast Gaza City, according to staff at al-Shifa Hospital; witnesses told Al Jazeera the people hit were returning from the burial of an earlier attack victim, while Gaza Herald reported that a drone struck a tent housing displaced people near the Al-Hurriya Clinic in Tuffah and that another Palestinian was killed in a morning strike near Dar Al-Arqam School in the same district. Another person was killed in a drone attack in eastern Gaza City, al-Shifa Hospital said, and in central Gaza, staff at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital reported one person killed and another injured in Deir el-Balah. Gaza Herald's medical sources identified the Rafah victim as a police officer, Abdul Jawad Hatim Jouda, killed in a strike on the Fash Farsh area.
Who was the boy killed in Deir el-Balah?
The Deir el-Balah victim was a 14-year-old schoolboy. Quds News Network named him as Mohamed Abu Hammad and said his family reported he was on his way to school, helping his father earn a living, when an Israeli strike hit a gathering of civilians in central Gaza; he was killed still wearing his schoolbag. Gaza Herald, which rendered his name Muhammad Riad Abu Hamad, reported that the Palestinian Ministry of Education said he was killed by a drone in the Al-Baraka area, near the Egyptian Committee warehouses south of Deir al-Balah, while returning from school, and that shrapnel from the attack penetrated his school bag. The two accounts differ on whether he was travelling to or from school; both place a 14-year-old student, killed by a drone in the Deir el-Balah area on Saturday, at the centre of the day's toll. He is one of more than 340 children killed in Gaza since the ceasefire began, according to UNICEF, whose spokesman Ricardo Pires told reporters in Geneva on Friday that seven children had died in attacks over the previous two weeks and at least 33 more had been seriously injured.
Why does the toll keep rising under a ceasefire?
Because the strikes have not stopped, and the space left to Gaza's people keeps shrinking. Al Jazeera reported that mapping it published on October 12 showed Israeli forces control or restrict access to about 65 percent of the territory, that the "Yellow Line" marking Israeli military positions after a partial withdrawal has been pushed further into Palestinian areas, and that the remaining accessible area is home to 2.1 million people. UNICEF said about 800,000 children remain displaced, many in tents or unsafe buildings as winter approaches. Saturday's pattern — a man killed near a cemetery in Jabalia, mourners or a displaced family's tent hit in Tuffah, a schoolboy killed in Deir el-Balah — is the pattern the ministry's numbers describe in aggregate: 1,511 dead in a year of nominal ceasefire, with no day in the latest 48 hours free of new dead and wounded.
Attribution note: the six deaths and their locations are the accounts of Palestinian medical and emergency workers, the Wafa news agency and hospital staff in Gaza City and Deir el-Balah, reported by Al Jazeera; the Health Ministry's 48-hour and cumulative figures are the ministry's own, as reported by Al Jazeera and Gaza Herald. The schoolboy's name and the circumstances of his death are reported by Quds News Network, citing his family, and by Gaza Herald, citing the Palestinian Ministry of Education and local sources; the Rafah victim's name is Gaza Herald's, citing medical sources. No Israeli military statement on Saturday's strikes was included in the reports opened for this article.
