A relative of 6-month-old Mira al-Khabbaz, who was reportedly killed in an Israeli strike earlier in the day, carries her body outside Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on February 4, 2026.
Israeli strikes in Gaza killed at least 20 Palestinians, most of them women and children, by midday Feb. 4, according to hospital officials, with Israel halting the passage of patients through the Rafah border crossing amid ill-treatment allegations during the already limited crossings.
Israel pledged to continue strikes, saying that it was responding to a militant attack on Israeli soldiers that seriously wounded one.
Among the Palestinians killed were five children, including a 5-month-old and a baby just 10 days old, seven women and a paramedic, said hospital officials.
They are the latest Palestinians in Gaza to die since a ceasefire deal, which has been punctuated by deadly Israeli strikes, came into effect on Oct. 10, 2025. More than 530 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli in that time, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
“The genocidal war against our people in the Gaza Strip continues,” said Dr. Mohamed Abu Selmiya, director of Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, in a Facebook post. “Where is the ceasefire? Where are the mediators?”,
A Gazan health official told the media that Israel also briefly halted the passage of patients through the Rafah border crossing to Egypt, allowing a trickle of Palestinians to cross for the first time in months.
Many hoped the reopening of the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza would bring relief to the war-battered territory, but for the first few Palestinians allowed to cross, it proved more harrowing than a homecoming.
Three women who entered Gaza on the first day of the reopening told The Associated Press that Israeli troops blindfolded and handcuffed them, then interrogated and threatened them, holding them for several hours and inflicting what they said was humiliating treatment until they were released.
The three were among 12 Palestinians — mostly women, children and the elderly — who entered Gaza on Feb. 2 through Rafah.
The three women said the abuse took place at a screening station on the edge of the area of Gaza under Israeli military control that all returnees were required to pass through after crossing Rafah.
The 12 returnees were brought by bus through the crossing, then drove until they reached the Israeli military zone, said one of the returnees, Rotana al-Regeb, who was coming back with her mother, Huda Abu Abed. The two had left Gaza in March last year for the mother to get medical treatment abroad.
At the screening station, they were ordered out of the bus and members of an Israeli-backed Palestinian armed group, Abu Shabab, including one woman, searched their bags and bodies, she said.
Israeli officers then called them one by one into a room, she said. She said her mother was called first. When al-Regeb was called, she said she found her mother, who is in her 50s, kneeling on the floor, blindfolded with her hands handcuffed behind her back.
