The ceasefire in Gaza is nine months old, and the killing during it has settled into a pattern with a specific target: the people who keep civil order. On July 14 an Israeli strike hit a police station in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, killing eight, including the station's director; Gaza's interior ministry called it a 'horrific massacre' [1][3].
The strike was not isolated. The UN human rights office has recorded at least 12 Israeli attacks on Gaza's police since January 2026, killing 35 officers - many, it notes, hit while directing traffic or overseeing markets [1]. Across the whole ceasefire period, Palestinian authorities count 1,122 people killed in 3,689 recorded Israeli violations over 275 days, among them at least 275 children [1][2].
Israel says those it kills are Hamas fighters, or that its forces faced imminent threats. In the police strikes, according to Al Jazeera, it has provided no evidence for the individual targeting of the men killed [1]. The day after Jabalia, a strike on an apartment in Deir el-Balah killed the Abu Qassem family - Omar, Asma, and their six-year-old daughter, Habeeba - and Israel again said it had 'targeted a Hamas fighter' [2].
The distinction between a police officer and a combatant is the whole architecture of the laws of war, and it is the distinction the 'Hamas' label erases without having to prove anything. Analysts see a purpose in the pattern: a police force and a civil administration are what a territory needs to govern itself and to rebuild, so killing them, week after week, hollows out the machinery of Gaza's future as surely as it ends the individual lives [1]. The record is a count of both - 35 police, 1,122 people, 275 children - filed under a ceasefire [1][2].
Nine months in, 'the ceasefire is holding' remains the phrase, and beneath it the people who direct traffic and oversee markets are being killed at their stations and labeled, without evidence, as fighters [1][2]. What the record shows is not a lull but a method [1].
