Israeli strike on a Gaza City apartment kills five, eight dead across the Strip

An Israeli airstrike on a residential building in western Gaza City killed at least five people early on Saturday, and hospital sources put the day's toll across the Strip at eight.

Gaza's civil defence and staff at al-Shifa Hospital said the strike hit the al-Asala building in the Remal neighbourhood while residents were asleep. Al Jazeera's Hani al-Shaer, reporting from Gaza, said it came without a prior warning. He put the blasts at about 2 a.m. local time, near the al-Haid roundabout, and said two explosive drones hit the building. Fires burned for at least an hour before civil defence crews put them out. The count from that building, as he reported it, was at least three women, a child and a young man.

Among the dead were two Christian women, Maysa Khader Ibrahim Abu Daoud, also referred to as Ayyad, and her daughter Mary Hafez Michel al-Najjar. The Palestinian Wafa agency carried a statement from Ramzi Khoury, head of the Higher Presidential Committee for Church Affairs, naming them. Their funerals were held at the Church of St Porphyrius in Gaza City. Eyewitness Ahmed al-Dahdouh told Reuters he was asleep when the explosions woke the children, and that neighbours pulled bodies from the rubble, including a mother and daughter. He said the two were not involved in the fighting. Reuters reported the strike killed at least five Palestinians, including four women, and that the building was destroyed.

The other deaths on Saturday, hospital sources told Al Jazeera, included one person killed in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza and two who died of wounds from earlier strikes. That is the arithmetic behind the figure of eight. The Israeli military had offered no comment by the time Reuters and CBC filed on Saturday afternoon.

The strike sits inside a ceasefire brokered by the United States last October. Gaza health officials say Israeli fire has killed at least 1,400 Palestinians since that agreement. The ceasefire text calls for eventual reconstruction. A night strike on an apartment block in Remal, with no immediate military claim of a target, is the sort of incident mediators have treated as a breach. Israel has, in earlier cases during this truce, said it was hitting militants who were planning attacks. It has not said that about al-Asala.

The Christian dead give the day a second record. Gaza's Christian community is small, and St Porphyrius has already been hit in the war. A mother and daughter from that community, named by the church-affairs committee and buried from the church, are now part of the post-ceasefire toll. Dahdouh's remark, that Muslim neighbours pulled them out, is the local account. The political account is that a truce which still produces a named civilian funeral in a church is not holding in Remal.

Mediators have a $2.45 billion, six-month reconstruction outline on the table from the US-backed Board of Peace, and an argument over disarmament and withdrawal that has stalled it. Saturday's strike does not decide that argument. It adds five names from one building, and three more from the rest of the Strip, to a post-truce count health officials put at about 1,400. The open question is whether the Israeli military identifies a target in al-Asala, or whether the building stays, in the public record, a residential block hit at 2 a.m. without a stated reason.