An Israeli airstrike claimed the lives of at least two Palestinians in the central Gaza Strip on Monday, health officials reported, while Israeli ground forces extended their reach deeper into a northern Gaza neighborhood, sending families scrambling to escape.
According to medics, the strike hit near a residential building in the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing two brothers identified as Ahmed and Mahmoud Abu Heen. The Israeli military offered no immediate response to requests for comment.
A ceasefire brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump in October 2025 has not succeeded in stopping Israeli military operations in Gaza, nor has it brought about the disarmament of Hamas militants.
With these latest fatalities, the death toll among Palestinians from Israeli strikes since October has climbed to nearly 1,000, according to the Gaza health ministry. Israel reports that four of its own soldiers have been killed by militants during that same stretch of time.
Amid the ongoing violence, Nickolay Mladenov, Trump’s Board of Peace envoy for Gaza, traveled to Cairo to advance negotiations. Sources familiar with the discussions say mediators from Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey have been meeting with Hamas leadership regarding the second phase of Trump’s Gaza plan. That plan calls for Hamas to surrender its weapons and for Israeli forces to withdraw — terms that both sides have so far been unable to agree upon.
Israeli troops currently hold more than 60% of Gaza’s land, areas from which civilians have been ordered to leave and where structures have been demolished. On May 28, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly confirmed he had instructed the military to push that figure to 70%.
Witnesses in southern Gaza report that over recent days, Israeli forces have pushed the boundaries of the so-called “Yellow Zone” — the areas under their control — outward into eastern Khan Younis and northern Rafah, where new boundary markers and concrete barriers have appeared.
On Sunday, Israeli tanks rolled further into the Al-Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City in the north, compelling multiple families to abandon their homes. Video footage captured on Monday showed yellow boundary blocks that had been repositioned closer to residential buildings.
“I swear we don’t know where to go,” said Umm Muhammad Junaynah, a resident of Al-Tuffah, visibly struggling to hold back tears as she gathered her belongings. “We are getting our furniture out, we don’t know where to go. We don’t know where to go, we have nowhere to go.”
Almost all of Gaza’s roughly 2 million residents — the majority of whom have already been uprooted multiple times — are now crowded into a narrow coastal strip, living in makeshift tents or partially destroyed buildings under Hamas control.
Nour Shabat, a 27-year-old woman from Al-Tuffah, described the terror of Sunday night. “It was a night of terror, we were scared,” she said.
Gaza has been reduced to rubble over the course of a two-year Israeli military campaign that began following Hamas’s 2023 attack on southern Israel.
Shabat expressed her exhaustion with the repeated upheaval. “I’m tired of displacement, honestly I’m tired of displacement. What is our fault that this is happening to us?” she said. “Should I take my belongings, myself and go sleep in the street? I have slept in the streets many times and I have been displaced many times. I’m tired and can’t handle anymore. Enough, I am tired.”
