GAZA CITY: Israeli strikes across Gaza Strip on Friday killed nine people, including five in an attack that targeted a police vehicle.

Despite an October ceasefire, Gaza remains gripped by daily violence as Israeli strikes continue and both the Israeli military and Hamas accuse one another of breaking the truce.

Five people were killed and several others injured when an Israeli air strike hit a police vehicle in the Al Mawasi area of the southern city of Khan Yunis, said the civil defence agency, which operates as a rescue service under Hamas.

In a separate incident, two people -- a woman and a child -- were killed, and five others injured when Israeli artillery struck residential homes near Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza.

In a third attack, an Israeli aircraft struck another police patrol in Gaza City, the territory’s largest urban centre, killing two people and injuring two others, it added.

The October truce has largely halted the Gaza conflict, which began on Oct 7, 2023.

But violence has persisted, with at least 792 Palestinians killed since the truce began, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which is under Ham.

The Israeli military has reported five soldiers killed in Gaza since the start of the truce.

Unexploded bombs

Gaza is heavily contaminated by unexploded ordnance, which frequently kill and maim people and could threaten recovery efforts far into the future, the UN said Friday.

Unexploded ordnance, ranging from undetonated bombs or grenades to simple bullets, has become a common sight in the Gaza Strip since the start of Israel’s war in the Palestinian territory, sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on October 7, 2023.

The United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) said it had data suggesting that since the start of the conflict, more than 1,000 people had been killed in Gaza due to “indirect conflict”, from the remnants of war.

Julius Van der Walt, UNMAS chief in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, stressed that that number was certainly a severe under-estimate.

Half of the known casualties were children, he told reporters in Geneva.

Speaking along side him at a press conference on mine action work worldwide, Narmina Strishenets of Save the Children UK, also highlighted the heavy toll on youngsters.

A report by the organisation published last year found that in 2024, the use of explosive weapons in Gaza left an average of 475 children each month with potentially lifelong disabilities, including amputations.

Today, Strishenets said, Gaza has “the largest cohort of child amputees” in the world.

Van der Walt said UNMAS had so far been unable to conduct an extensive survey of the full scope of the problem, but “the evidence already suggests a high density of explosive ordnance contamination across the Gaza Strip”.

Published in Dawn, April 25th, 2026