An overnight strike on a Gaza City apartment kills at least five

An Israeli strike early on Saturday hit an apartment in the al-Asala building in the Remal neighbourhood of western Gaza City and killed at least five people, medical staff at al-Shifa Hospital said. At least six others were badly wounded. The accounts differ on who the dead were. They agree on the building, the hour, and the absence of a warning.

Al Jazeera's Hani al-Shaer, reporting from Khan Younis, said the strike came in the middle of the night, around 2 a.m. local time, with no prior warning. He said fighter jets grew louder and three strikes followed, hitting the apartment and killing those inside. The munitions went through the target floor and into the floors below. Fires burned for at least an hour before civil defence crews put them out. Crews were still searching the rubble for missing people while drones remained overhead. Hind Khoudary, reporting from Gaza City, called it another terrifying night and said the neighbourhood shook. She said doctors told her it was very hard to save the wounded because medical supplies and instruments remain restricted.

The casualty list is not settled. Al Jazeera, citing al-Shifa, said the dead included three women, a child and a young man, and in the same dispatch said four women were among the dead, including an elderly Christian woman and her daughter. Anadolu, citing a medical source at the same hospital, said four women, including two Christians, and a young man were killed, and that six people were wounded. The overlap is the Christian women and a young man. The gap is whether a child is counted separately from the women. Civil defence had not published a named list by the time those reports moved. Until it does, the firm figure is five dead and at least six wounded, with the composition still being reconciled.

Local sources told Anadolu that warplanes fired at least two missiles at the apartment, that the fire spread, and that neighbouring homes were badly damaged. The same accounts said the army demolished buildings in areas it controls east of Tuffah, in northeastern Gaza City, on the same morning. Those demolitions are a separate action from the Remal strike. They sit in the day's tally because they happened inside the same city on the same date.

Other deaths were already on the Saturday count before the apartment strike became the lead item. TRT World, citing Anadolu, reported that Ibrahim Abu Uwaimer was killed in a drone strike on a courtyard behind the Al-Razi Medical Complex in Nuseirat, in central Gaza, and that his body was taken to Al-Awda Hospital. Ahmed al-Ramlawi was killed in a strike on a tent on a rooftop near Palestine Stadium, west of Gaza City. Ibrahim Munir al-Masri was killed, and another person injured, in a strike near the Ansar junction southwest of the city. Those three names are attached to three sites. They are not part of the al-Asala dead.

The strike falls inside a ceasefire that has been in place since October 2025 and that both sides treat as broken in practice. The Gaza Health Ministry told Anadolu that, as of Thursday, violations of that ceasefire had killed at least 1,439 Palestinians and injured 5,052. The same ministry's running figure since 7 October 2023 is more than 74,000 dead and more than 175,000 injured. Al Jazeera put the post-ceasefire toll in the same range, more than 1,400 killed and nearly 5,000 injured. Those are ministry figures. They are the numbers reporters are using because the Israeli military had not, in the dispatches available on Saturday morning, named a target inside the al-Asala building or given its own casualty count.

Remal is one of the densest residential districts left in Gaza City, and it holds displaced people in camps as well as residents in apartment blocks. A strike that enters at one floor and continues through the floors below will hit people who were not in the apartment that was aimed at, if an apartment was the aim. That is the factual problem the civil defence search is trying to close: how many were in the target flat, and how many were in the flats underneath. The hospital count will move if more bodies come out of the lower floors.

No Israeli statement naming the building was in the reports used here. The absence does not establish that the strike was unclaimed. It means the public record on Saturday morning is the hospital list, the civil defence search, and a ministry tally of 1,439 people killed in ceasefire violations before this apartment was hit.