The fragile October ceasefire, a document celebrated by the United States as a “victory for peace,” has become a death certificate for hundreds of Palestinians still being hunted by Israeli forces in the battered enclave. Early Sunday morning, the silence of the Maghazi refugee camp was shattered by the roar of an Israeli warplane. Just hours later, a car in the Al-Amal neighbourhood of Khan Yunis was turned into a molten wreck, claiming the lives of two more men. By the time the sun set over Gaza, at least three Palestinians were dead, including two senior members of the local police force.
For the survivors, there is no confusion about what this violence represents. It is not a response to an attack; it is a deliberate policy to tear apart the last threads of civil society in the Strip. “The occupation aims to create chaos and confusion within the Gaza Strip,” mourner Ali Mousa told Reuters as the bodies of the officers were carried through the streets. “This is its sole objective.” As the world watches the Straits of Hormuz or the election campaigns in Washington, Gaza is bleeding out slowly, one targeted strike at a time.
The two officers of the Hamas-run police force were not on an active battlefield when they were incinerated. They were travelling in an ordinary civilian vehicle in southern Gaza. According to the Hamas-run interior ministry, the brutal attack specifically killed the head of the criminal police force in Khan Yunis, Wessam Abdel-Hadi, and his aide. The General Directorate of Police identified the second victim as Sergeant Fadi Heikal.
These men were not rocket engineers or militants; they were the part of the very fabric that holds a crumbling society together. As Israeli forces have systematically withdrawn from large areas of the Strip under the terms of the October truce, a security vacuum has emerged. The internal security forces, predominantly police have been the front line in controlling looting, distributing aid convoys to starving families, and preventing the total breakdown of law. By assassinating the leadership of these civil police forces, Israel is sending a bloody message: no authority will be tolerated in Gaza.
The attack on Sunday is not a lone incident. Reuters has tracked a definitive pattern, noting that Israel has “heightened its attacks on Gaza’s Hamas-run police force”. The official data is damning. Since the US-brokered ceasefire came into effect in October, this quiet, low-intensity war has already claimed the lives of at least 850 Palestinians according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Of that total, over 2,433 have been severely wounded.
While the international community focuses on the prospect of peace talks between the US and Iran, the silence regarding Israel’s actions in Gaza is deafening. The Hamas movement denounced the escalation as “a continuation of the enemy’s crimes and terrorism against our Palestinian people,” calling for international guarantors of the truce to finally uphold their obligations.
Implicit in this criticism is stinging acknowledgment: the current ceasefire has turned into a "hunting permit." With the United States focused on containing the energy crisis triggered by the regional war, and the global committees continuing to argue legal minutiae about "right of return," the Israeli military apparatus is expanding its "Yellow Line" deeper into Gaza territory, weaponizing the ceasefire to entrench its military gains. As the white-shrouded bodies of the officers were taken for burial on Sunday, the chants were not just for the dead, but for the thousands still waiting at home, knowing that the “ceasefire” offers them no safety.