32 Gazans said killed in wave of strikes as IDF responds to truce violation
Military says it targeted Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives, weapons sites after gunmen emerged from Rafah tunnel; strikes are among the deadliest since October ceasefire
Noam Lehmann
The Times of Israel
Jan 31, 2026
At least 32 Palestinians, including women, children and Hamas police officers, were reported killed in a wave of airstrikes across the Gaza Strip overnight and into Saturday morning — one of the highest death tolls since the October ceasefire — as the Israeli military confirmed it targeted terror commanders and infrastructure in response to what it called a “violation of the ceasefire agreement.”
The Israel Defense Forces said its strikes targeted four commanders in the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror groups, as well as a weapons depot, an arms manufacturing site and two rocket launching positions.
“The terror organizations in the Strip systematically violate international law, while brutally exploiting civilian institutions and operating in the presence of the local population,” the military said in a statement.
Hamas’s civil defense agency said it had retrieved the bodies of 32 people killed in seven different locations since Saturday morning. Hamas authorities claimed that around a quarter of those killed were children, about a third were women, one was an elderly man and five were officers in the Hamas-run police force.
The Hamas-run health ministry reported another 30 people wounded, some in critical condition.
The tolls could not be independently verified, and Israel did not release its own casualty figures.
Among the reported strikes was an attack on the Sheikh Radwan police station in Gaza City, which Hamas’s interior ministry said was hit Saturday morning. Palestinian media put the death toll from the police station at 16, including officers and detainees.
Hamas’s interior ministry said the dead at the police station included several civilians and at least five officers, including one with a rank equivalent to colonel, two of a rank equivalent to major, and two of a rank equivalent to lieutenant. At least 15 police officers were also wounded, the ministry said.
Elsewhere, Palestinian media reported three people killed in an Israeli strike near an UNRWA school in the Nasser district of western Gaza City.
Hamas accused Israel of carrying out a “blatant violation of the ceasefire agreement,” claiming that 12 people killed in overnight strikes included six children, and that seven of the dead belonged to a single family sheltering in a displaced peoples’ camp in Khan Younis.
According to the military, the strikes were launched after eight gunmen emerged from a tunnel in southern Gaza’s Rafah on Friday. The IDF said at the time that three of the gunmen were killed in strikes and a fourth, described as a key Hamas commander, was captured.
The army said the incident in Rafah constituted a breach of the ceasefire.
Egypt, Qatar condemn strikes as ‘violation’ of truce
Following the strikes, Egypt’s foreign ministry issued a statement condemning Israel’s “repeated violations” of the truce, and urged all parties to “exercise the utmost restraint,” ahead of the expected opening of the Rafah Crossing.
The flare-up in violence came a day before Israel was set to reopen the only crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt for pedestrian traffic in both directions at the start of next week, in accordance with the ceasefire deal
Qatar also issued a condemnation of the strikes: “The State of Qatar expresses its strong condemnation of the repeated Israeli violations of the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip… in a dangerous escalation that will inflame the situation and undermine regional and international efforts aimed at consolidating the truce.”
Israeli fire has killed more than 500 people — most of them civilians, according to Gaza health officials — since the US-brokered truce between Hamas and Israel took effect in October after two years of war. The Gazan figures cannot be confirmed.
Palestinian terror operatives have killed four Israeli soldiers since the truce, according to Israeli authorities.
The two sides have traded blame over ceasefire violations, even as Washington presses them to proceed to the next phases of the ceasefire deal meant to end the conflict for good.
The war started following the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking a further 251 hostages. The body of the final hostage, Ran Gvili, was returned this week, ending the first phase of US President Donald Trump’s plan.
The next phase of Trump’s plan includes complex issues such as Hamas disarmament, which the group has long rejected, further Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the deployment of an international peacekeeping force.
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