JERUSALEM: Israeli airstrikes killed five people around Gaza City on Monday, a local hospital and rescuers said, with the Israeli army saying it had targeted Hamas “military operatives”.

Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City said on Monday morning that it had received two bodies “following an Israeli airstrike that targeted the entrance of a residential building near the municipal park in Gaza City”.

Later in the day, the hospital said it received three additional bodies and several wounded “as a result of an Israeli drone strike that targeted a civilian car in the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood, southwest of Gaza City”.

The civil defence, which operates as a rescue service under Hamas authority, confirmed the toll of the two strikes.

Images shared by the civil defence showed workers inspecting the car targeted in the second strike, completely destroyed and reduced to a blackened shell of warped metal, as a crowd of bystanders gathered around it.

When contacted, the Israeli military said that in both strikes it had “attacked operatives from Hamas’s military wing”, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam brigades. It later identified one of the dead as Omar Mohammed Roshdy Saraj and said he supplied weapons to Hamas.

“The terrorists were struck in order to remove the threat they posed,” a military statement said.

Despite a US-backed ceasefire that took effect in October 2025, violence has not halted in the Gaza Strip, with Israel continuing to target Palestinians it says are militants.

At Al Shifa Hospital, relatives and friends paid their last respects to two of the five men killed on Monday before carrying the white-shrouded bodies to the cemetery to bury them.

“There is no ceasefire. There is not one good day in Gaza since October 7 (2023),” said Amjad Abu Abdo, a relative of one of the people who died in the first strike on Monday.

Published in Dawn, September 1st, 2026