Israel carried out new strikes in Gaza yesterday as it marked the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks by Hamas, with Palestinian officials reporting three people dead.
Loud bangs across the border in Gaza were audible from the site of the Nova music festival just as family members gathered at dawn to mourn the more than 300 revelers killed three years earlier.
In Gaza City, Al Shifa hospital reported two people killed in an Israeli strike overnight.
Gaza’s civil defence identified one of the dead as Mohamed Tamous and said he was a volunteer for the agency, which serves as an emergency rescue service under Hamas.
In the southern city of Khan Younis, Nasser Hospital said that a 60-year-old man, Hisham Ibrahim Abu Mustafa, was killed in an Israeli strike and that others were injured.
On the third anniversary of the first day of the war in Gaza, living conditions remain dire in the coastal Palestinian territory, despite a US-brokered ceasefire that came into effect in October 2025.
In the Gaza Strip, devastated by three years of Israeli bombardment, Palestinians sheltering among the ruins of destroyed cities recalled life before a war that displaced nearly the entire population and tore apart families.
The attacks of October 7, 2023, were the deadliest day in Israel’s history. Hamas killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages, a cross-border incursion that traumatised Israelis who have demanded government accountability.
Israel’s subsequent bombardment and ground operations in Gaza have killed more than 74,000 people, including at least 1,400 killed in the past year since a US-brokered ceasefire, which halted major fighting but has failed to stop Israeli attacks.
“After three years of siege, killing and destruction, Israel has turned the Gaza Strip into an uninhabitable place,” said Gaza City resident Mahmoud Abu Hasira.
Hundreds of thousands of displaced people still live in tent cities and makeshift shelters that sprawl on beaches or next to piles of rubble from bombed-out residential buildings.
“We once had homes, but now we have lost our loved ones, whose bodies still lie beneath the rubble,” said Bassam Nasser, a resident of Beit Hanoun, a now largely destroyed city in Gaza’s north, who was displaced in the early days of the war.
Israel says it controls about 60 per cent of Gaza, on the territory’s outer perimeter including Beit Hanoun, while most of the Palestinian population lives in the remaining Hamas-controlled areas.
Though Israel eased its restrictions on aid trucks entering Gaza after the ceasefire, Ahmed Nasser, another resident of Gaza City, said that life remained desperately hard.
“The war and the famine have left us hungry, fearful and displaced, living in tents and struggling with soaring prices,” he said.
Umm Mohammad, a mother of five displaced from Gaza City and now living with her husband and children in a tent encampment in Deir Al-Balah, said the war had ripped her family apart.
“We were one happy family. The war displaced us,” she said.
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