Israeli forces killed two children in Gaza in a strike on Saturday, according to the family and a Gazan health official, amid persistent violence in the territory despite an ongoing cease-fire.
Ahmed al-Farra, an official at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, which received their bodies, said the two children had been killed in Bani Suheila, an eastern neighborhood of the city that is close to the so-called “yellow line” to which Israeli forces withdrew as part of the cease-fire.
The children’s father and uncle identified the two boys as a pair of brothers, Fadi and Juma Abu Assi, the oldest of whom was 10-years-old.
They said the two children had gone out to gather wood, leaving their home on the outskirts of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, before being killed.
The Israeli military said forces had “identified two suspects” who crossed the cease-fire lines, “conducted suspicious activities on the ground,” and posed a threat to nearby Israeli soldiers in southern Gaza.
The military did not comment on reports the two were children. “Following the identification, the air force, directed by forces on the ground, eliminated the suspects in order to remove the threat,” the military said in a statement.
Much about the incident remains unclear, including how the two brothers might have wound up crossing the withdrawal line. In a separate incident on Saturday, the Israeli military said its forces had also killed a militant in southern Gaza who crossed the yellow line.
Family members gave slightly differing accounts of the two boys’ ages. Their father Tamer Abu Assi said in an interview aired by Palestine TV, the official broadcaster for the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank, that they were 10 and 9 years old.
Raed Abu Assi, their uncle, said in a phone interview that Juma was 10 and Fadi was 8. Mr. Abu Assi said he had worked for the security services of the Palestinian Authority, which opposes Hamas, although he has previously expressed some support on social media for the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire in mid-October, which paused more than two years of devastating fighting. The war was ignited by the October 2023 attack, which killed about 1,200 people and saw about 250 taken hostage back to Gaza, mostly civilians.
The subsequent Israeli military campaign destroyed huge swathes of Gaza and, according to a Saturday toll by Gaza’s health ministry, more than 70,000 people have been killed during the course of the war, including thousands of children. The ministry does not say how many were combatants.
Mediators, including the Trump administration, Qatar and Egypt, hope the cease-fire will ultimately lead to a permanent end to the war.
But the truce did not fully end the fighting. Since then, Israeli forces have come under fire from militants several times, with at least three Israeli soldiers killed. The military has at times responded by launching airstrikes across Gaza, killing at least 100 people in a single day of attacks, while others have been killed after approaching the yellow line.
“They say there’s a cease-fire, but it’s just a lie,” said Raed Abu Assi, 52. “Every night they bomb, they shell, they shoot. And we’re the ones paying the price.”
Aaron Boxerman is a Times reporter covering Israel and Gaza. He is based in Jerusalem.
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