Even after hard-won ceasefire, violence continues in Gaza

But the killing of Palestinians has still not stopped for more than a day or two at a time.

Death can come from crossing the Yellow Linethe poorly demarcated border between eastern Gaza, where the Israeli army has dug in, and the western half, where Hamas is trying to reestablish control over Gaza’s more than 2 million residents.

Dozens of times since the truce went into effect on October 10, Palestinians have been killed for crossing to the east, knowingly or unknowingly.

Palestinians say the continued bloodshed shows that Israel does not respect the ceasefire and is, at best, indifferent to the lives of civilians in Gaza.

The Israeli military says it has only opened fire in response to ceasefire violations and that its rules of engagement only allow it to attack those it perceives as threats.

Death may come from an inappropriate relationship, as happened to much of the Abu Dalal family in Nuseirat.

When Israel attacked two cousins ​​on October 29 — both were local militant commanders, it said — overnight missile strikes destroyed their homes.

One of the men died, as did others 18 members of his extended family, including two 3-year-old children.

For Maysaa al-Attar, a 30-year-old pharmacy student, death came from being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He was shot in the abdomen while sleeping in his parents’ tent in northwest Gaza on the morning of November 14.

Three weeks earlier, they had set up the tent on the ruins of the family house.

Ali al-Hashash, 32, died around 8 a.m. on November 6 while searching for firewood east of the Yellow Line to feed his pregnant wife, who was due to give birth in a few days, and his 4-year-old son.

According to his father, Hasan al-Hashash, there was no gas for cooking in the Bureij refugee camp where they lived.

It is a risk that many in Gaza run with the arrival of the cold.

On December 18, Saeed al-Awawda, a 66-year-old friend of al-Hashash, was shot while collecting firewood in the same area, al-Hashash said.

“I keep thinking, ‘I wish my son had only lost his hand, not his life.'”

The lieutenant colonel Nadav Shoshanian Israeli military spokesman, stated that the army’s procedures were designed to avoid civilian casualties.

When Palestinians who are not clearly armed cross to the Israeli side of the Yellow Line, he explained, soldiers are under orders to warn them to turn around and, as a last resort, stop them by shooting them in the lower legs.

He said plainclothes Hamas militants, sometimes with concealed weapons, were scouting the Yellow Line, making almost anyone approaching Israeli positions appear a potential threat.

“In most cases, violations are committed by Hamas,” Shoshani said.

“And in most cases where it’s not Hamas, we can warn people and they back down.”

The Israeli military was unable to address al-Attar’s death, of which it said it had no knowledge.

The Palestinian authorities claim that 406 personas have died since the ceasefire, including 157 children.

This does not compare to the carnage of the previous two years of war, which began with the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 people, and which triggered an Israeli invasion of Gaza in which, according to local health authorities, 70,000 people have died, an average of hundreds each week.

But the rising death toll highlights the fragility of the truce, with a hard-to-delineate border, bitter enemies nearby and Palestinian militants sometimes emerging from tunnels on the Israeli-controlled side and opening fire on Israeli soldiers.

The imbalance in death tolls on both sides also reflects the continuation, despite the ceasefire, of Israel’s harsh wartime military practices of counterattacking forcefully and allowing attacks on militants even when they risk killing large numbers of civilians.

On October 17, a week after the ceasefire, a dozen members of the Shaban and Abu Shaban families piled into a van in Gaza City to go on a hike.

Trusting in the relative safety of the truce, they left the overcrowded tent camp where they lived to visit their two homes in Zeitoun, a virtually destroyed neighborhood to the southeast.

One of them was dangerously close to the Yellow Line, not yet marked.

Othman Shaban, 14, accompanied them. He said the family came to one of their two homes to see what was left.

“My father said, ‘Let’s go check the other house.’ “We were enjoying the moment when we left.”

He said he and his father, who was driving, had collected firewood in the area on foot several times recently, so they believed it was safe.

Othman said his truck ran into debris blocking the road.

“I got out of the car and removed the rocks from the road,” he said.

As his father drove the truck to pick him up, he said:

“Suddenly I heard an explosion.”

A relative who stayed behind, Mohammed Abu Shaban, said he believed Othman’s father may have inadvertently driven onto the Yellow Line.

The Israeli army later marked it with yellow-painted concrete blocks.

“Gaza is so devastated that it is easy to get lost”said Abu Shaban.

Othman suffered injuries to his neck and legs.

Everyone in the van died:

his parents, three of his siblings – a sister, Nisma, 16, and his brothers Anas, 12, and Karam, 10 -, Abu Shaban’s sister, her husband, their daughter Jumana, 9, and their sons Naser, 12, Ibrahim, 6, and Muhammad, 4.

The Israeli military said in a statement that its forces had fired warning shots at “a suspicious vehicle” that had crossed the unmarked line, but that the vehicle continued toward them “in a manner that caused them an imminent threat” and that “troops opened fire to eliminate the threat.”

Shoshani added that the distance from the Yellow Line to Israeli territory was only “two minutes by car” in many places.

But Othman said there were no warning shots, just the explosion that killed his family.

Othman’s description of the location of the attack — on Saladin Street, a major Gaza artery, hundreds of meters west of the Yellow Line — also contradicts that of the Israeli military.

According to his version, the van was not so close to the territory occupied by Israel that it was perceived as threatening to cross it.

The military says there was no attack at the location Othman described.

Civil Defense rescuers waited almost a day to receive Israeli permission to collect the bodies from the burning vehicle, Abu Shaban said.

They found only nine, or “eight and a half,” he said, to be morbidly precise.

Despite the truce, militants in Gaza have sporadically opened fire on Israeli soldiers.

On each occasion, Israel has responded with overwhelming force against large groups of targets far from the attack sites.

On October 28, an Israeli soldier was killed by a sniper in Rafah – the third Israeli soldier killed since the ceasefire and, to date, the last of the war.

That night, Israel responded by attacking, killing at least 100 people in Gaza.

It was midnight in Nuseirat, about 16 miles north of Rafah, when missiles hit the first of two houses belonging to the extended Abu Dalal family.

The next day, the Israeli military claimed to have attacked 25 terrorists in Gaza, including Yahya Abu Dalal and Nazmi Abu Dalal, who it said were commanders of the Islamic Jihad militant group.

The military said nothing about civilian casualties.

Amr Al-Sabakhi, 20, was in his home across the street when he said two missiles hit the home of his aunt Hala, wife of Yahya Abu Dalal, 50.

He ran out to try to help and found his 15-year-old cousin Bayan dead, his body split in two. Yahya and Hala were dead.

Bayan’s three brothers were also dead, including 11-year-old Mostafa, as were other family members, including 3-year-old twins.

Another neighbor, Muhammad Qasem, 41, said his mother suffered a deep scalp wound from the explosion.

“I always feared that house would be hit,” he said of Abu Dalal’s house, hinting at the possibility that Yahya Abu Dalal was an Israeli target.

But, he added, “I thought there would at least be advance warning, so that the neighbors would not be harmed.” There were none, he said.

Shoshani stated that the planned airstrikes went through a rigorous approval process.

While Israel warns civilians before attacking buildings or other infrastructure, it does not do so when seeking to eliminate specific enemy targets, for fear they will escape, and “there is no army in the world that does that,” he said.

He did not say whether Israel was unaware of the presence of so many civilians or whether it decided that the targets justified the risk that so many civilians could be killed.

Other members of the Abu Dalal clan rushed to try to help after the airstrike, including Nizar Abu Dalal, 48, who lived around the corner.

He returned home a couple of hours later, according to his wife, Iman Abu Dalal.

Her daughter, Dareen, 23, said she and her mother talked about leaving, but decided they didn’t have anywhere safer to go.

Shortly after 3:30 am, Iman Abu Dalal said:

“I heard the whistle of a missile,” then she felt herself being thrown and rolling violently, before passing out.

Dareen, two of his brothers and his young daughter, Shatha, survived the attack.

His father, Nizar, died, as did his 24-year-old brother, Majd, who was due to get married in November.

However, his body was found days after the attack, crushed between concrete slabs.

The Israeli military defended the attacks on the houses, saying that the two targets, Yahya and Nazmi Abu Dalal, “had been involved for years in directing and leading terrorist activities” against Israel.

Above Nizar’s house, where Nazmi, his brother, lived, the carnage was much worse.

Nazmi, the target of the second airstrike, was wounded but survived. None of his immediate family survived.

His wife was murdered, as were his seven children, whose ages ranged from 21-year-old Baraa to 8-year-old Zeinab.

Baraa had painted her nails that afternoon, her cousin Dareen said.

When the results of the Tawjihi, the college eligibility exam for Palestinian high school seniors, were released a few weeks later, one daughter, 18-year-old Duha, had scored 96.7%.