Gaza strikes killed at least 12 Palestinians on New Year’s Day. Most of the dead were women and children, Palestinian health officials said. The nearly 15-month-old war entered 2025 with ceasefire talks stalled. Conditions in the enclave were at their bleakest of the winter.
In the northern town of Jabaliya, an airstrike destroyed a house. A woman and four children died, the Gaza Health Ministry said. At least a dozen others were wounded. In the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, a strike on a home killed a woman and a child. Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital reported the deaths. In the south, a strike in Khan Younis killed three people. The Nasser and European hospitals there confirmed the toll.
Key Points
- Gaza’s Health Ministry put the Palestinian death toll since October 2023 above 45,000 heading into the new year. Its figures do not distinguish civilians from combatants.
- Israel’s military said it targeted militants and noted rockets had been fired from the Bureij area toward Israel.
- Defence Minister Israel Katz warned that if Hamas did not release hostages and halt rocket fire, Israel would strike with a force “not seen in Gaza for a long time.”
Gaza strikes: a war entering its second calendar year
The Gaza strikes capped a year in which Israel’s offensive levelled much of Gaza’s urban core. The offensive followed Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack, which killed about 1,200 people and seized some 250 hostages. It also displaced roughly 90 per cent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, many of them repeatedly. By January, winter was compounding the misery. Heavy rain flooded tent encampments pitched on sand and rubble. Hospitals reported newborns among those dying of hypothermia.
Around 100 hostages remained in Gaza at the start of the year. Israel believed at least a third of them were dead. Families of the captives kept up a nightly pressure campaign in Tel Aviv. They accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of sacrificing their relatives to prolong the war. Katz issued his ultimatum on Wednesday: release the hostages and stop the rockets, or face escalation. He aimed it at Hamas’s leadership. Meanwhile, indirect talks in Doha and Cairo drifted without a date for resumption.
Background: aid, law and a narrowing enclave
Humanitarian agencies describe a population compressed into a shrinking coastal zone. Israel directs evacuees there. Aid groups say deliveries fall far short of need. Looting and access denials strand convoys. Israel maintains that it facilitates aid. It blames Hamas for diverting supplies and fighting from civilian areas. The war also sits under an expanding legal shadow. Proceedings are under way at the International Court of Justice. Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders. Israel and the United States reject the charges.
What happens next
The diplomatic logjam broke two weeks later. On Jan. 15, mediators announced a ceasefire and hostage-release agreement. It took effect on Jan. 19. The deal paused the fighting and freed the first groups of hostages and Palestinian prisoners. It also let displaced families walk back toward Gaza’s north. However, the deal’s fragile first phase framed a hard question. January’s grim opening had posed it: would the pause become an end to the war, or merely its intermission?
The day’s toll from the Gaza strikes deserves to be read as scenes rather than arithmetic. Jabaliya, where the deadliest strike landed, sits in the north. Israel’s offensive from October had already largely emptied and shattered it. Rescue crews there work with limited equipment. Ambulances struggle to reach the wounded through rubble. Bureij, where a woman and child died, is a camp built for refugees of the 1948 war. It is now home to their grandchildren, in one of the most densely built places on earth. Casualty figures travel through a permanent fog. The UN has found the Health Ministry’s counting broadly reliable in past audits. Israel disputes its framing and says Hamas inflates civilian tolls. Yet the destinations of the bombs are not in dispute. They land, each time, on families marking another calendar turn in tents.
Sources: Gaza Health Ministry and hospital reports, Jan. 1, 2025; Israel Defense Forces statements; Israeli Ministry of Defense remarks by Israel Katz; UN OCHA humanitarian updates.
