The Gaza ceasefire is under severe strain in early November 2026, with new Israeli strikes reported across the territory, a rising casualty count attributed to Gaza health officials, and a United Nations warning that civilians are being pushed into ever smaller areas. The latest deaths have arrived while negotiators have still not settled the questions left open by the United States-brokered truce that took effect in October 2025: how Hamas will be disarmed, how far Israeli forces will withdraw, and when large-scale reconstruction can begin.
For families in Gaza, that argument is not abstract. It is about whether a tent will survive the next rain, whether a road home is open or closed, and whether a relative who left for a shift will return. For diplomats, the same events raise a different question: whether a deal designed to stop a war is settling into a pattern of continued, lower-level killing that neither side calls a return to full war, but that keeps claiming lives almost every day.
The figures in this article are attributed throughout to the bodies that reported them. Casualty counts from Gaza are reported by the Gaza Health Ministry, Gaza medical sources, or Gaza civil and interior authorities, and they have not been independently verified by USN. Israeli military statements are reported as the Israeli military’s account. Where outlets reported different counts for the same day, that difference is noted, because hospital reports and the inclusion of people who later died of earlier wounds can change a daily total within hours.
What medics and officials reported on 1 to 3 November
According to Gaza medical officials and the Gaza Interior Ministry, at least eight Palestinians were killed on Sunday 1 November. Reports of that day described five police officers killed in western Khan Younis, in the al-Mawasi area, and three other people killed in Gaza City. The reports reviewed did not provide a single agreed list of names for all eight, and the Israeli military’s public comments on that day’s operations were limited. The pattern, however, was consistent: strikes in the south and in Gaza City on the same day, during a ceasefire that was supposed to have stopped them.
On Monday 2 November, reports were updated through the day. Early reports from medics said two people were killed and six others wounded in two separate airstrikes in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, and a third person was killed in an airstrike in the central town of al-Musaddar, also spelled al-Masdar in some reports. Later on Monday, medics reported that an airstrike on a vehicle in Gaza City’s Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood killed one more person and wounded others. Taken together, those later reports put Monday’s toll at at least four people killed in new strikes, with a fifth person dying of wounds from an earlier attack, according to medical sources and media reports reviewed on 3 November.
The Israeli military said it had carried out strikes in Gaza on Monday targeting Palestinian fighters, without initially giving detailed information about each strike. In a separate statement reported on 2 November, the Israeli military said recent strikes had killed six Hamas operatives, including two men it said had taken part in the 7 October 2023 attack on Israel. That claim is the Israeli military’s account, and it was not presented in the reporting reviewed as an independently verified list covering every person killed on Monday.
On Tuesday 3 November, reports from Gaza described further deaths. According to the Palestine Chronicle, three Palestinians were killed when Israeli forces bombed a police station in Khan Younis, and Gaza’s Interior Ministry identified one of those killed as First Lieutenant Khaled Ibrahim Mohammed Shalouf, 44, a member of the Internal Security Service in Rafah Governorate. Local sources also reported that a man identified as Imad Omar Ahmed Radi, 39, died on Tuesday from wounds sustained in a bombing on Monday in the Japanese neighbourhood north-west of Khan Younis. Israeli warships were also reported to have fired shells toward waters off Gaza City and Khan Younis on Tuesday morning, although no deaths were attributed to that shelling in the reports reviewed.
Read together, the three days show why a single daily number can mislead. A person counted as wounded on Monday can be counted as dead on Tuesday, and a strike described in one neighbourhood can appear in another report under a slightly different spelling. What is not in doubt in the reporting is the direction of travel: people were killed on each of those days, in different parts of Gaza, while the ceasefire remained formally in place.
Gaza ceasefire toll nears 1,600, according to Gaza health officials
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, at least 1,593 Palestinians had been killed and 5,748 wounded in Israeli attacks since the ceasefire took effect in October 2025, in figures reported on 2 and 3 November. Other reports published at slightly different times gave slightly different totals, including at least 1,580 killed in earlier reporting on 2 November and 1,599 killed and 5,774 wounded in a later report on 3 November. Those differences reflect the time at which each count was taken and whether newly reported deaths had been added, not a dispute about the overall scale. USN is reporting the ministry’s figures as the ministry’s figures, and independent verification remains difficult while access to Gaza is restricted and hospital reporting continues under wartime conditions.
The ministry also reported, in its daily update on Monday, that hospitals had received 15 bodies and 38 wounded people over the previous 48 hours. That two-day figure helps explain why the cumulative toll moved quickly in early November: it was not only the strikes on a single day, but the arrival at hospitals of people killed or wounded over a weekend of continued attacks. Gaza’s Government Media Office, in a separate statement reported on Monday, said it had recorded 5,989 ceasefire violations since the agreement took effect, including shootings, bombings, demolitions, incursions and arrests. That violations count is the media office’s count, using its own definition of a violation, and it is not the same measure as the Health Ministry’s casualty count.
Israel, for its part, has said four of its soldiers have been killed since the ceasefire, according to reporting of Israeli figures on 2 November. The contrast between the two sides’ casualty figures is itself part of the dispute over the ceasefire: each side presents its own losses as evidence about who is breaking the deal, and neither side’s figures have been fully reconciled by an independent count in the reporting reviewed. The longer toll, covering the period since October 2023, was put by the Gaza Health Ministry at at least 74,609 killed and 175,872 wounded in reports on 2 and 3 November, a total that includes both the period before the ceasefire and the period since it took effect.
Two competing explanations for the continued killing
Israel says Hamas has been rearming and launching attacks in violation of the ceasefire, and it has stepped up strikes in recent weeks on that basis. The Israeli military has said its recent targets included Hamas operatives who, in its account, were advancing attacks on troops and civilians and working to restore Hamas’s capabilities. From Israel’s perspective, as presented in its statements, those strikes are enforcement of the ceasefire’s terms, not a breach of them, because the deal is said to require Hamas to disarm and to stop rebuilding its forces.
Hamas has denied trying to carry out attacks or rebuild its arsenal, and it accuses Israel of undermining the Gaza peace deal. From Hamas’s perspective, as presented in its statements and in Gaza official statements, the continued strikes, the control of large parts of Gaza by Israeli forces, and restrictions on aid and shelter materials amount to a failure to implement the deal. Gaza’s Interior Ministry, in its statement on the Khan Younis police officers, condemned attacks on police and security personnel and described them as an attempt to spread disorder, a claim that reflects the Gaza authorities’ view that policing and civil order should not be treated as a military target.
Between those two positions sits the unresolved core of the ceasefire. The deal called for eventual reconstruction, but negotiators have not agreed terms for Hamas to disarm or for Israel to withdraw its troops, who, according to reporting on 2 November, control about two-thirds of the territory after ordering residents out of those areas. Until those terms are agreed, each side can point to the other’s actions as the reason the next step has not happened, and each new strike can be presented by one side as enforcement and by the other as a violation. In Gaza, residents describe a reality in which gunfire, airstrikes and demolitions continue, even if at a lower intensity than during the heaviest fighting before October 2025, while Israeli officials describe a ceasefire that is conditional on Hamas disarmament.
The Gaza Yellow Line and the UN warning on displacement
On 30 October, the United Nations Human Rights Office, known as OHCHR, warned that Israeli military operations continued to force Palestinians into ever smaller areas of Gaza. The office said it had documented, over the preceding two weeks, a westward expansion of Israeli deployment areas in al-Shujaiyeh in Gaza City and in eastern al-Bureij, eastern Deir al-Balah and eastern al-Maghazi in central Gaza. It said Israel had stated an aim to increase its military deployment area to 70 percent of Gaza’s territory, a stated aim that the UN office reported, not a verified measurement of current control.
The warning centred on the boundary known as the Yellow Line, the demarcation line from the ceasefire arrangement behind which Israeli forces were expected to remain. Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN Human Rights Office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, described the displacement in Gaza as both acute and chronic, and said many people displaced before the ceasefire had little prospect of returning because the areas they fled remained beyond the Yellow Line. The office said it had received reports that on 25 October, an Israeli drone dropped munitions on tents at al-Shujaiyeh junction near the Yellow Line, and the resulting fire burned for about five hours. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Public Works and Housing, as relayed by the UN, 200 families, comprising about 800 people, mostly women, children and older people, were displaced by that incident.
OHCHR also said Israeli forces appeared to treat the Yellow Line as a zone in which Palestinians were prevented from returning to what remained of their homes on the other side. That characterisation is the UN office’s assessment, based on its documentation. Israel says restrictions on certain areas and materials are required for security, including because some items could be diverted for military use, while UN agencies say those controls have delayed ordinary medical, sanitation and shelter equipment. The Yellow Line is not always clearly marked on the ground, according to reporting on the UN warning, and in heavily damaged neighbourhoods it can be difficult for civilians to know exactly where a restricted area begins. The office also reported that it had verified 1,076 conflict-related Palestinian deaths between the ceasefire announcement and the end of July 2026, of which 331 occurred near the Yellow Line.
Winter shelter shortage and the Mladenov visit
The November strikes arrived as displaced families faced a fourth winter in tents, according to the UN Human Rights Office, with many tents described as too flimsy to withstand rain. The United Nations migration agency said on 9 October that nearly two million people in Gaza required shelter assistance and that half of Gaza’s tents and makeshift shelters needed replacing. Reporting on the shelter picture in early November added that Gaza’s Social Development Ministry had said about 200,000 tents were needed, while only a small number had arrived, a claim attributed to that ministry and linked in the reporting to Israeli entry restrictions.
Aid figures reported on Monday underline the gap. Gaza’s Government Media Office said only 20.3 percent of agreed aid trucks entered Gaza during October, and that total deliveries since the ceasefire reached 33.3 percent of the agreed number, according to its statement. Those percentages are the media office’s calculations, based on its own count of agreed versus delivered trucks, and they are not presented here as a UN-verified delivery rate. They do, however, match the broader picture in UN reporting: shelter materials are among the items whose entry has been restricted, and families are entering winter with inadequate cover.
Against that background, Nickolay Mladenov, the high representative of the Board of Peace, the United States-established body created to oversee the Gaza peace plan, arrived in Israel on Monday 2 November, according to Israeli Army Radio reporting carried by Al Jazeera and other outlets. The reported purpose of the visit was to seek permission for tents to enter Gaza and to push for faster reconstruction. The Board of Peace, under the plan associated with United States President Donald Trump, is meant to supervise the next phase of the ceasefire, including a technocratic Palestinian administration, Hamas disarmament, the deployment of an international stabilisation force, further Israeli troop pullbacks, and reconstruction. Mladenov, a former United Nations envoy for the Middle East, is the board’s representative on the ground.
Whether a visit can unlock tent deliveries depends on decisions that are not made by the board alone. Entry of shelter materials requires Israeli permission at crossings, coordination with humanitarian agencies, and a distribution system inside Gaza that can reach families in crowded, damaged neighbourhoods. The need is not only for tents themselves, but for materials that can withstand rain and wind, for sites that are not at high risk of flooding, and for sanitation and water systems that have been damaged. For now, the reconstruction promised by the ceasefire remains largely a plan rather than a programme on the ground, and tents remain the main shelter for most displaced families.
What happens next for the Gaza ceasefire
The next test will be whether the deaths of 1 to 3 November lead to a diplomatic response or simply become part of a new, grim normal. If the pattern of the past year continues, each side will restate its position, mediators will call for restraint, and the ceasefire will survive in name while families continue to be killed and displaced. If, instead, the Board of Peace visit produces a concrete agreement on tent entry and on a timetable for reconstruction, the winter could be less deadly than the UN warning suggests, even if the political questions remain unresolved.
Three questions will shape that outcome. First, will Israel allow a substantial increase in shelter materials and aid trucks, quickly enough for families to prepare before the worst winter weather? Second, will Hamas and Israel agree, through mediators, on a verifiable path to disarmament and withdrawal that gives each side a reason to stop the cycle of strikes and alleged rearmament? Third, will the international community, through the Board of Peace and humanitarian agencies, provide the funding and capacity to turn a plan for reconstruction into homes, clinics and water systems? None of those questions has an answer in the reporting from 1 to 3 November. What the reporting does show is that the ceasefire, a year after it was agreed, has not yet delivered the basic protection its name promised: a place to live safely through winter, a road home that is open, and a day without a new casualty report from a hospital in Gaza.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from The Hindu, Al Jazeera and UN News.