CAIRO: Israeli strikes and gunfire killed at least four Palestinians in Gaza on Monday, health officials said, as mediators prepared for further ceasefire talks in Cairo to safeguard a US-brokered peace plan for the tiny war-ravaged Palestinian enclave.
Medics said an Israeli airstrike killed a woman in the town of Zawayda in the central Gaza Strip, while another strike killed one person in the nearby Nuseirat refugee camp.
Later on Monday, an Israeli airstrike targeted the rooftop of a building in Gaza City, killing two people, a medic and his son, health officials said.
The Israeli military said it killed two Hamas fighters in separate strikes in the Gaza Strip. It said they were planning to carry out attacks against Israeli troops, without providing further details.
The violence comes as Nikolay Mladenov, US President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace envoy for Gaza, was expected to arrive in Cairo, sources close to the mediation effort said, a day after Hamas delivered its response to a 15-point blueprint he had presented to them in recent weeks.
The sources said Hamas and other factions had agreed on all the points except Hamas disarmament, which the group links to Israeli withdrawal and a political track to negotiate Palestinian statehood.
An October 2025 truce brokered by Trump has failed to halt Israeli attacks in Gaza or to secure the disarmament of Hamas militants.
Deadlock
Israel and Hamas remain deadlocked over how to proceed with the next stage of Trump’s Gaza plan, which involves Hamas laying down its arms and Israeli withdrawals.
Hamas said that leaders of Palestinian factions who held discussions with mediators Egypt, Qatar and Turkiye over the past week in Cairo had stressed the need for Israel to “fully and unconditionally comply with the terms of the ceasefire agreement, in its entirety and without fragmentation”.
Hamas blames the absence of a full agreement to end the Gaza conflict on Israel’s refusal to fulfil first-phase obligations agreed in October.
Published in Dawn, June 16th, 2026
