Strikes said to kill 5 in Gaza as top officer says IDF has taken over 60% of Strip

Five people were killed in Israeli strikes throughout Gaza on Thursday, with a senior Israeli officer confirming that the Israel Defense Forces have taken over 60 percent of the Strip’s territory, in what further demonstrated the porous nature of the ceasefire with Hamas.

Medics said an Israeli airstrike killed two people near the Tuffah neighborhood in the north of the enclave, while a third person was killed in Israeli tank shelling in the Zeitoun suburb in eastern Gaza City.

Another airstrike at a tent encampment for displaced people in western Gaza City killed one person and wounded several, while an attack on a vehicle in Khan Younis, in the south, killed another, medics said.

Witnesses also reported that an airstrike hit a residential building in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, causing damage to several homes nearby.

The deaths add to a toll of more than 1,100 Palestinians killed by Israeli strikes since an October ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect, according to Gazan health officials. The figure doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants, but the IDF has found the Hamas health ministry figures to be generally reliable.

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The army only commented on one of the Thursday killings, confirming that it carried out an airstrike in northern Gaza that killed an individual who it said was a Hamas commander who invaded Israel during the October 7, 2023, onslaught.

Nihad Riyad Abd al-Rahim Arouq was a platoon commander in Hamas’s Shati Battalion and recently worked to train additional terrorists and advance attacks on troops, the military claimed.

“The terrorist posed a threat to our forces operating in the Gaza Strip and was eliminated in a precise aerial strike,” the IDF said.

The IDF in recent months has ramped up strikes on terror operatives in Gaza, including numerous October 7 terrorists, insisting almost every time that they posed a threat to Israeli forces. But those strikes have also come with civilian casualties, including women, children and aid workers.

The IDF said earlier Thursday that its troops had destroyed four Hamas weapon depots in strikes in central Gaza overnight. It also confirmed a strike from Wednesday that killed a Palestinian identified as Omar Ahmed Abu Qasem. The IDF called him a Hamas sniper commander who recently acted to restore Hamas’s capabilities and advance attacks, “in violation of the ceasefire agreement,” the IDF added.

Separately on Thursday, Central Command chief Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth declared that Israel now controls more than 60% of the Gaza Strip’s territory, well beyond the portion of the enclave that Israel was allowed to temporarily continue holding as part of an October 2025 ceasefire deal with Hamas.

“We are standing here [near] the northern Gaza Strip, looking at everything we have achieved — and we have achieved a great deal. More than 60% of the Strip is in our hands,” said Bluth during a handover ceremony on Wednesday for the commander of the 99th Division, whose forces operated in the Strip in recent years.

“There is a security zone for the communities near the Gaza border, held by two divisions and the IDF’s finest soldiers. The threat of an invasion, as occurred nearly three years ago, is no longer possible,” he said.

It marked the first time that an IDF official had publicly confirmed that the military had expanded its areas of control in the Strip.

Bluth added, however, that “Hamas still controls [its portion of the Strip] and the murderous organization retains residual capabilities, and its vision of destroying Israel has not changed.”

In May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he ordered the IDF to take control of 70% of the Gaza Strip. At the start of the truce, the military controlled around 53% of the war-torn Palestinian enclave, with Hamas controlling the other 47%, where nearly all of the Strip’s two million residents live.

Last month, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged that Netanyahu’s directive goes against US President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan to end the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

However, the US has refrained from pushing Israel to roll back its takeover of additional Gaza territory and hasn’t commented publicly on it further.

“The entire people of Gaza have not lived a single day or a single moment of ceasefire. This ceasefire is an illusion,” Jibril Khattab, a relative of one of the victims, told Reuters in Gaza City’s Al Shifa Hospital on Thursday.

“No place in all of Gaza is safe,” he added.