United States President Donald Trump announced “a historic agreement” on July 30 for the disarmament of Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza, framed as the long-awaited move into the second phase of the October 2025 “ceasefire” deal.
The agreement was negotiated through the Board of Peace, established by Trump to oversee post-war reconstruction and governance of Gaza.
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However, Hamas negotiator Ghazi Hamad told Al Jazeera the Palestinian group would not implement the deal unless Israel fulfilled its obligations, which include halting attacks and withdrawing troops.
A spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, meanwhile, said Israeli forces would not withdraw until Hamas was fully disarmed.
With that fundamental deadlock unresolved, Israeli attacks on Gaza, which have characterised the 10-month “ceasefire”, continued, arguably with even greater intensity. Within days of the announcement of the “historic agreement”, Israeli strikes killed at least 19 Palestinians in a single day, bringing the weekend death toll in Gaza to 26.
Board of Peace envoy Nickolay Mladenov condemned the escalation without naming Israel directly: “Two days of strikes across Gaza have killed civilians and destroyed medical supplies that people depend on,” he said.
The attacks capped a month that was the deadliest in Gaza this year, and the deadliest for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, in terms of Israeli settler attacks, since 2023.
New deal, no change
On Sunday, strikes hit families in their homes. In Gaza City’s al-Sousi Tower, a strike killed Abdullah Abu Taif, 33, his pregnant wife, Abeer Anan, 29, and their five-year-old son, Azzam. Medics recovered the remains of an unborn child from the rubble, according to sources at al-Shifa Hospital.
In al-Qarara, near Khan Younis, a strike on an apartment killed Mahmoud al-Hams, 38, his wife, Fatima, 37, and their young daughter. Three others were wounded, medics at Nasser Hospital said.
Near Deir el-Balah, an elderly couple, Kamal and Huda Abu Muailiq, 68 and 59, were also killed in their home. A separate strike killed two brothers riding a motorbike in the same area.
Later that evening, a strike on a tent sheltering displaced people in Gaza City’s Remal neighbourhood killed two people, including a child. Four more people died in the neighbourhood when a drone struck a vehicle near the Sharia Court. Israel claimed the attack hit military operatives.
On Saturday, an overnight strike destroyed the medicine warehouse attached to Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir el-Balah, wiping out two of four storage facilities and severely damaging two more. The Israeli military said it hit a Hamas weapons depot located next to the hospital, one of five such sites it said it struck that night.
Gaza Minister of Health Director-General Munir al-Bursh told Al Jazeera the strike “turns medicine and illness itself into a tool of war”.
The Health Ministry said that July was the deadliest month in Gaza since the start of the year, with 152 people killed. By August 3, the cumulative toll since the October 2025 “ceasefire” had reached 1,250 killed and more than 4,100 wounded.
On August 1, Gaza’s Civil Defence completed a two-week search of a flattened home in the Sabra neighbourhood, retrieving 112 bodies, 40 of them children. Some 157 people remained missing, according to Mohammed Abu Dan, who oversaw the recovery. Some, he said, were fused into concrete by the force of the explosions.
Thousands of bodies are believed to still be under the rubble across Gaza.
Elsewhere in Gaza this week, one-year-old Zaid Nofal was killed when a strike hit his family’s home in the Bureij refugee camp. In Khan Younis, an Israeli drone strike on a tent killed eight-year-old Ratil Abdullah and 20-year-old Abdullah al-Balawi, according to Gaza Now.
Israeli forces also further expanded the “Yellow Line”, which demarcates Israeli-occupied Gaza from the rest of the besieged territory, placing new concrete barriers on Salah al-Din Street – Gaza’s main north-south route – near Shujayea, cutting off displaced families from one of the Strip’s few remaining unobstructed roads.
Settler attacks surge ahead of elections
The West Bank saw its own week of escalation, one that the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said made July, jointly with March, the deadliest month for Palestinians in incidents involving settlers since October 2023.
OCHA recorded more than 1,380 settler-related incidents across the West Bank since the start of 2026, averaging 6.6 a day. Demolitions and settler violence displaced an average of 17 people a day this year, double the rate of the previous three years.
A report released this week by the Palestinian National Bureau for Defending Land and Resisting Colonization said no soldier from Israel’s settler-heavy “Hagmar” defence units has been arrested for killing a Palestinian since at least 2017, and more than 93 percent of investigation files into settler attacks have been closed without indictment.
A week after four Palestinians and two Israelis were killed in Tal in the Nablus area, settlers walked through the village, escorted by Israeli soldiers and armoured vehicles. The same wave of settler encroachments saw a 10-year-old boy shot in the back on July 31 near al-Mughayyir. Israeli police subsequently arrested an off-duty soldier, a settler, on suspicion of the shooting, Haaretz reported.
Days later, settlers attacked Issam Radwan, 71, and his wife Nahil, 65, on their farmland near Beitillu, beating them with clubs. The village council head said Nahil suffered a fractured skull, a bite wound and a broken forearm, while Issam had a broken shin.
In Idhna, west of Hebron, armed settlers descended from a nearby outpost and attacked a Palestinian home. Soldiers who arrived later attacked residents who came to the family’s aid and fired tear gas at them.
As attacks and raids unfolded across the West Bank throughout the week, settlers erected new illegal outposts. While closures across the West Bank eased somewhat from the previous week’s near-total siege, the small town of Sinjil, north of Ramallah, and its roughly 8,000 residents entered a third week under closure. Its main entrance is still sealed with earth mounds and metal barriers, making routine trips difficult and potentially deadly.
Land seizures kept pace with the violence. In the Jenin governorate, Israeli authorities issued orders within days seizing roughly 200 dunums (0.2 square kilometres) of land, some of it for military roads stretching more than 11km to serve a network of outposts approved by the government, the Wafa news agency reported.
In the northern West Bank, Israeli NGO Kerem Navot documented what researcher Dror Etkes told Haaretz was an unprecedented step: military orders seizing Palestinian Authority-administered land in Area A – not for security, but to connect two new illegal settlements, Noa and Emek Dotan, ahead of Israeli families moving in next month.
In Masafer Yatta, an Israeli court rejected petitions against the demolition of the Zif secondary girls’ school, which serves 251 students, and three homes in Khirbet al-Mafqara, clearing the way for both to be razed at any time, Wafa and local activist Osama Makhamreh reported.
Adding to a steady stream of international criticism, Global Affairs Canada, the country’s foreign ministry, said the settlements were “illegal under international law”. Israeli officials responded to the criticism by accusing Ottawa of moving to “embolden terror”.
The UN’s rights office, meanwhile, said it was “alarmed” by Israeli plans to expand settlements further.
