An Israeli airstrike on Saturday killed the head of the Hamas-led police force in the northern Gaza Strip, Brigadier General Abdel-Nasser Al-Maqadma, the Hamas-run interior ministry and medics said.
Maqadma, one of at least five Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes on Saturday, was also known as the governor of the northern Gaza Strip.
He was killed in the Sheikh Radwan area north of Gaza City, medics said.
The Israeli military said he was also part of Hamas’s military wing.
Israel has killed dozens of members of the Hamas-led police force, including senior officials, in the past months, accusing many of them of being members of the Hamas armed wing who posed imminent threats to Israel and its forces inside Gaza.
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Hamas says Israeli attacks on the police force and its headquarters are intended to sow chaos and anarchy in the enclave and violate the US-brokered October ceasefire.
???? متابعة | وزارة الداخلية والأمن الوطني في غزة: استشهاد مدير شرطة محافظة شمال غزة عميد/ عبد الناصر محمد المقادمة (54 عاماً)، إثر استهدافه من طائرات الاحتلال في حي الشيخ رضوان شمال، غربي مدينة غزة. pic.twitter.com/VLZ2oSJg2s
— فلسطين أون لايـن (@F24online) July 25, 2026
The IDF also said Saturday that several Hamas operatives, including a terrorist who invaded Israel during the October 7, 2023, onslaught, were killed in strikes in the Gaza Strip this past week.
One strike in central Gaza on Tuesday killed Muhannad Asaad Mahmoud Abu Ghazal, a commander of a Nukhba Force cell. The military said Abu Ghazal raided the Kissufim area on October 7.
A separate strike on Tuesday in northern Gaza killed Raed Hani Mohammed, a surveillance operative in Hamas’s aerial array, according to the IDF. The same strike also killed Nabhan Mohammed Nabhan al-Amsi, chief of intelligence in Hamas’s Gaza City Brigade, the military said.
The IDF said the operatives had advanced attacks on troops and Israeli civilians, and were targeted to “remove the threat.”
צה”ל חיסל ראש חוליית נוח’בה שפשט למרחב כיסופים ב-7 באוקטובר ומחבלים נוספים מארגון הטרור חמאס
צה”ל תקף במרכז רצועת עזה מוקדם יותר השבוע (ב’), וחיסל את המחבל מהנד אסעד מחמוד אבו גזאל, ראש חוליית נוח’בה בארגון הטרור חמאס.
אבו גזאל פשט למרחב כיסופים במהלך טבח ה-7 באוקטובר.
בתקיפה… pic.twitter.com/fDWBhHiS9j
— צבא ההגנה לישראל (@idfonline) July 25, 2026
Meanwhile, Palestinian medics said an Israeli strike on Saturday killed a medic in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. They added that a police officer wounded by an Israeli airstrike last week died on Saturday. The Israeli military didn’t immediately comment on the incident.
An Israeli airstrike also killed two people in a house in Khan Younis, in the south of the enclave, medics said. The Israeli military said the strike targeted a member of the Islamic Jihad terror group.
Later on Saturday, an Israeli airstrike, also in Khan Younis, killed Khaled Al-Breim, a high school student, taking Saturday’s death toll to at least five. Relatives said Breim was killed as he sought to bring sweets to distribute to relatives and friends who had flocked into his family home to offer their congratulations as he had just concluded high school and was preparing for university.
The Israel Defense Forces did not immediately comment on the student’s death.
The latest deaths add to a toll of more than 1,180 Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks since an October ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect, according to Gaza health officials, who allege that most were civilians.
A firefighter tries to extinguish a fire from a destroyed building following an Israeli strike at the Al-Jalaa street in Gaza City on July 24, 2026. (Omar AL-QATTAA/AFP)
Israel says it only targets terrorists, who are operating from within the civilian population. Hamas does not usually disclose its losses.
The truce halted full-scale fighting but has not ended near-daily Israeli strikes. Four Israeli soldiers have been killed by terror operatives in Gaza over the same period.
Peace talks stalled
Mediators including Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and the United States have been trying to advance US President Donald Trump’s plan for ending the conflict in Gaza, which calls for Hamas disarmament and Israeli withdrawals, but there has been little sign of progress in the efforts.
The war began when Hamas-led terrorists attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 72,000 people in the Strip have been killed during the war — including over 600 since the October 2025 ceasefire — though the toll does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
The Israeli military believes that Hamas’s overall toll is largely accurate, with IDF officials estimating that two to three civilians were killed for every dead terror operative.
The IDF says it has killed over 23,000 combatants in Gaza and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 onslaught.
A man rides a bicycle beside the ruins of buildings destroyed by Israeli bombardments in Gaza City, June 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)
Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 477.
Israel effectively controls an estimated 64% of the tiny coastal Strip, bombarded to ruins in the war that followed the 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel.
Nearly all of Gaza’s 2 million people now live on a tiny strip of land, mainly in makeshift tents or damaged buildings and facing dire conditions, under Hamas control.
The United Nations’ human rights office this week condemned Israeli strikes in Gaza.
“Nine months after the announcement of a ceasefire, still, nowhere is safe for Palestinians in Gaza,” UN rights office spokesman Thameen Al-Kheetan told reporters in Geneva.
He decried that “the Israeli military has intensified its attacks in Gaza in recent days, killing and injuring dozens of Palestinians.” The Israeli strikes had killed “at least 57 Palestinians, including six children and eight women” from July 13 to 20, Kheetan said.
The Israel Defense Forces has in recent days announced a series of strikes in the Gaza Strip targeting Hamas and Islamic Jihad members who it said were involved in the October 7 attack, or the subsequent holding of hostages.
It also reported striking a weapons depot, an arms manufacturing site, and a rocket-launching position, saying that this infrastructure posed a threat to its troops.
Kheetan said the strikes had targeted residential buildings, at least one tent sheltering internally displaced people, and other crowded areas, with 34 of the victims “killed far away from the Israeli-imposed yellow line,” referring to the border between an IDF-controlled majority of the Strip and its remainder, which is de facto controlled by Hamas.
Displaced Palestinians walk between tents where they are taking shelter at a makeshift camp in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, July 1, 2026. (Abdel Kareem Hana/AP)
In attacks on July 17 and 18, Kheetan said the UN rights office had determined that 10 Israeli strikes killed at least 21 Palestinians.
“In one of these attacks, on an apartment in Gaza City, five members of one family were killed together: Both parents and three siblings, reportedly aged eight, 15, and 17,” he said.
Kheetan stressed that “the killing of civilians in these attacks raises concerns of continuing violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes and other possible atrocity crimes in Gaza,” adding: “Under international law, deliberately attacking civilians is a war crime.”
Though it was not immediately clear which strikes he was referring to, Israel said strikes on July 17 killed a Palestinian Islamic Jihad sniper, as well as a member of Hamas’s operations division, and that strikes on July 18 struck weapons depots, as well as two Hamas terrorists, including a commander, who invaded Israel on October 7 and were responsible for the taking of hostages.
Israel has in recent months ramped up its efforts to target and kill terrorists involved in the October 7, 2023, massacre and its aftermath.
Israel rejects accusations that it ever targets civilians, and says it upholds all laws of war. It acknowledges that noncombatants are sometimes killed unintentionally, and notes that Hamas deliberately operates from civilian areas.
Earlier this week, officials involved in efforts to apply the US’s peace plan for Gaza told The Times of Israel that the framework envisioned last fall is moving forward in “baby steps,” but that meaningful progress on Hamas’s disarmament, de-radicalization, and widespread reconstruction could still be years down the line.
Hamas, which remains the de facto governing authority in the parts of the Strip not controlled by the IDF, is still refusing to disarm. Israel, in the meantime, has yet to approve procedural measures surrounding some parts of the plan — such as the deployment of foreign peacekeeping troops, the vetting of a new Palestinian police force, and humanitarian processes.