CAIRO — A Hamas commander, Alaa Al-Hadidi, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military said on Sunday, after strikes that Gaza health officials say left at least 20 Palestinians dead continued to test a month-old ceasefire. The strikes followed a Hamas fighter crossing a security buffer known as the “yellow line” and firing on Israeli soldiers, Israel says, as mediators in Cairo race to salvage the truce, Nov. 23, 2025.
Special unit to operate. Noting that the army set up a special unit to be in charge of the frontier with Gaza from Friday, the Arabic-language news website Arab News cited military spokesman Brigadier General Ahemd Abd al-Ati, who noted that further troops were also being sent to Sinai. There has been no statement from Hamas to confirm the killing, while some reports spell his family name as Haddadeh.
According to a Reuters report, Gaza civil defense and health authorities said the strikes killed at least 20 people and wounded more than 80, including by hitting a car in Gaza City and homes in Deir al-Balah and Nuseirat camp. The numbers could not be independently confirmed.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu painted the operation as part of wider efforts to prevent Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah from reattaining their military capabilities, telling a cabinet meeting that Israel was “continuing to strike terrorism on several fronts” and would “do everything necessary,” AFP reported.
Meanwhile, a Hamas delegation led by top official Khalil al-Hayya was visiting Cairo to discuss with Gazan war mediators from Egypt, Qatar, and the United States what it called Israel’s “continued violation of the ceasefire agreement,” Arab News reported, citing a Reuters dispatch.
Those discussions follow on an indirect negotiation that started in Egypt earlier this month, when Israeli and Hamas teams began hammering out the details of Donald Trump’s proposal to end the Gaza war—and clashed over whether Israel should withdraw from territory or Hamas disarm, as Reuters reported at the time.
The current lull, which went into effect Oct. 10, is the initial stage of a multilateral plan for peace in the Gaza Strip approved by the United States and broached by Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey that seeks to culminate in an end to almost two years of war and release of remaining captives while allowing extensive reconstruction aid to flow into the narrow seaside enclave.
But even under that framework, violence has continued in and around Gaza. On Nov. 17, the allied Palestinian Resistance Committees announced that what they described as an Israeli undercover unit had killed one of its local commanders near Deir al-Balah, and local health officials say more than 69,000 people have died in Gaza since the war began, and at least 268 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire after the ceasefire went into effect, Reuters reported.
But independent analysts say such flare-ups — and the killing of a high-profile Hamas commander, which set them off last week — underscore just how brittle the current pause is. The Council on Foreign Relations’ Global Conflict Tracker reports that both sides continue to accuse one another of having violated the deal, and says Israel has continued to carry out limited strikes that it argues target militant leaders who are rebuilding their networks under the ceasefire.
Residents in Gaza speak of limbo between war and peace, with many still sleeping in tents, basic services reduced to shards, and scant signs of shared economic recovery even as Israeli forces say they must continue targeting militant cells and Hamas commanders to prevent new attacks. For families already displaced multiple times, Saturday’s strikes had the effect of underlining fears that the fighting could escalate with full-blown force at any time.
For regional diplomats, it is a grimly familiar pattern. In May, it played a key intermediary role, brokering a truce between Israel and Hamas to end 11 days of rockets and airstrikes after both the Jewish state and Gaza’s Islamist rulers declared victory in a war that left medics struggling to cope with casualties.
During that earlier round, thousands of Palestinians filled the streets in Gaza City to celebrate the truce while senior Hamas officials, including al-Hayya, declared “victory,” according to live coverage by Al Jazeera. Whether negotiators in Cairo may now transform the fragile quiet following the latest killing of a commander of Hamas — an Islamist militia that controls Gaza and is sworn to Israel’s destruction — into longer-term peace is anyone’s guess among both Israelis and Palestinians.
