8-year-old Fadi, left, and 11-year-old Juma Abu Asi, right.
Two Palestinian children were killed by an Israeli drone strike on the edge of the Bani Suheila neighborhood of Khan Younis in Gaza on Saturday.
Palestinian medical officials at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis reported that an Israeli drone fired on two brothers in the area east of the city, in a zone that Israel designates as being on the Israeli‑controlled side of the ceasefire line.
Palestinian media also reported the identities of the victims as brothers from the Abu Asi family, Juma, aged 11, and Fadi, aged 8. International coverage noted that the strike took place close to the mapped Yellow Line east of Khan Younis, where the army has warned Palestinians not to approach its forces and has used drones and live fire to enforce the boundary.
Relatives interviewed by Palestinian outlets said the children had gone out to collect firewood for their injured father when they were attacked, underscoring that they were engaged in basic survival activity in an area that Israel had arbitrarily transformed into a kill zone.
Gaza’s Health Ministry has repeatedly stressed that those killed in such incidents are overwhelmingly civilians, including large numbers of children, and has characterized the ongoing Israeli fire in “ceasefire” conditions as deliberate terror against a besieged population.
While details of the incident remain limited, Reuters and other agencies have consistently reported that children of similar ages have been killed in Israeli attacks in southern Gaza, citing Gazan medical officials who provide names and ages as the bodies arrive at hospitals.
These reports confirm that the pattern seen in Bani Suheila—children killed while attempting to secure necessities in areas emptied and controlled by the Israeli army—is not a rare or isolated event but a feature of the Israeli occupation regime.
The Israeli military claimed that the two boys were “suspects” who crossed the Yellow Line in Bani Suheila, were engaged in “suspicious activity on the ground” and approached Israeli forces “in a way that posed an immediate threat.” They said that an air force drone strike was launched “to remove the threat.”
This formula is identical to wording used repeatedly since the official start of the ceasefire on October 10 to justify lethal force against unarmed Palestinians, including children, whose mere presence inside their own territory is redefined as a security danger.
Throughout the ceasefire period, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has continued to reject any recognition of Palestinian statehood even as the Gaza “peace” framework is pushed through the UN Security Council, insisting that Israel’s opposition to a Palestinian state “in any territory has not changed.” This stance is mirrored by the murderous attacks on Palestinians that has continued and is essentially an extension of the genocide that began more than two years ago.
Israeli officials have paired such statements with assertions that they will maintain full freedom of military action in Gaza throughout the ceasefire period, openly admitting that the lines and maps published for civilians do not restrict the army’s right to strike anywhere it deems necessary.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, as many as 350 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 900 wounded by Israeli fire since the ceasefire formally came into effect on October 10. These figures include people killed by drone strikes, tank fire and snipers along and beyond the Yellow and Red Lines, as well as those killed in continued airstrikes on residential areas and camps that Israel claims are linked to “security operations.”
Gaza’s government media office has documented nearly 500 ceasefire violations by Israel in this same period, including direct shooting incidents, incursions of armored vehicles beyond the Yellow Line, airstrikes, and the destruction of homes and civilian infrastructure in zones that were supposed to be safe for movement and limited reconstruction.
Independent trackers and timelines of the Gaza war confirm that the ceasefire has been punctuated almost daily by Israeli attacks, with Palestinian casualties rising steadily and the army explicitly invoking alleged ceasefire “violations” as pretexts for renewed bombardment.
Under the October 10 arrangement, Gaza has been divided into zones marked on online maps and physical markers indicating Yellow and Red lines that Palestinians are told not to cross. The Yellow Line separates areas open to limited civilian movement from zones under direct Israeli military control, while Red zones remain entirely off limits, encompassing swathes of destroyed neighborhoods and agricultural land.
Palestinians report that Israeli forces have frequently fired on people who remained within the supposed “permitted” areas but were deemed too close to the lines, and that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) vehicles routinely push beyond the Yellow Line deeper into Gaza.
The Bani Suheila drone strike, carried out against children on the Israeli‑controlled side of the ceasefire line, exposes the reality that the mapped “barriers” exist to regulate and punish movement rather than to guarantee any safety.
Parallel to the ongoing violence is the Trump administration’s aggressive reconstruction and “stabilization” scheme that would further partition Gaza and entrench Israeli control of Gaza. A US‑backed UN Security Council resolution endorses Washington’s 20‑point ceasefire strategy, calls for deployment of an International Stabilization Force to enter, disarm and govern Gaza, and establishes a “Board of Peace”—headed by the fascist US President Donald Trump—to oversee Israeli control, without any genuine Palestinian representation or commitment to statehood.
Central to this plan is the construction of large “Alternative Safe Communities” in Israeli‑controlled areas of Gaza, composed of dense housing compounds made of temporary structures, each designed to hold between 20,000 and 25,000 Palestinians and to include clinics and educational facilities.
These residential zones would be built primarily on the eastern half of the Strip under longstanding Israeli military control, creating a chain of isolated settlements ringed by army positions and international forces along the Yellow Line.
Media reports about the scheme identify senior Trump administration official Aryeh Lightstone—previously a key aide to former ambassador David Friedman and an architect of the Abraham Accords economic projects—as the point man for the “Alternative Safe Communities” initiative, publicly arguing that the compounds are the “easiest way” to get Palestinians into housing “as soon as humanly possible.”
Meanwhile, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son‑in‑law, has been closely associated with post‑war economic and real‑estate planning in Gaza and the wider region, leveraging his ties with Gulf monarchies and his background in property development. This is an unambiguous indication of the plan by powerful real estate interests to make a fortune from the conversion of Gaza into a vast wasteland of rubble where tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed and many thousands are still buried.
Media reports also indicate that other US officials involved include figures from the National Security Council and State Department Middle East teams who previously worked on regional investment schemes under the Abraham Accords framework, coordinating with Israeli officials and Gulf donors on infrastructure and housing proposals.
The US proposal explicitly seeks financial backing from Gulf states—particularly Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar—offering contracts and management roles to American and Israeli construction, engineering and security firms, which stand to make enormous profits from the construction and operation of these compounds and the policing architecture around them.
The funding model under review relies on a mix of Gulf grants, loans tied to international financial institutions, and private investment vehicles connected to US‑ and Israeli‑linked developers. Palestinian residents would have no ownership rights in these compounds and would remain dependent on external donors and administrators for housing, employment and access to services, via screening and vetting mechanisms run jointly by Israel, the International Stabilization Force and the Board of Peace.
For US and Israeli capital, the plan opens a new frontier of profit in the guise of humanitarian relief: construction contracts for temporary and semi‑permanent housing, security and surveillance systems, logistics, and the redevelopment of select “green zones” for commercial projects that exclude the mass of the Palestinian population.
By transforming Gaza into a patchwork of fenced “safe communities”—essentially overcrowded concentration camps—and off‑limits Red zones, the plan aims to convert a devastated, densely populated enclave into a source of highly-exploited labor and a consumer pool under long‑term occupation.
As pointed out by the World Socialist Web Site since the announcement of the October 10 ceasefire, the US‑Israeli “peace” framework is not a step toward Palestinian self‑determination or an end to the barbaric treatment of Gazans. These are instruments for consolidating a strategic defeat of the population while preserving the foundations of Zionist rule and US imperialism in the region.
The ceasefire has not halted Israeli violence; instead, it has provided a political and legal cover for continued killings, such as the Bani Suheila drone strike, while internationalizing the occupation through an “International Stabilization Force” that would police Palestinians on Israel’s behalf.
The creation of “Alternative Safe Communities” corresponds in content to the goal of ethnically cleansing zones in Gaza in which an uprooted people are warehoused under guard, stripped of basic democratic rights and any genuine control over their own lives.
By channeling reconstruction funds through US‑dominated businesses and Gulf monarchies, the plan will tie Palestinian survival to the same capitalist and imperialist forces responsible for their historic dispossession and make every aspect of daily life contingent on political oppression and subordination to the wealth accumulation aims of the international financial oligarchy.
The US‑Israeli plan, backed by all the imperialist powers and regional bourgeois regimes, aims to extinguish the Palestinian independence within the framework of capitalism by converting Gaza into a laboratory of permanent military control and super-exploitation.
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