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Israeli authorities imposed new limits on aid entering into Gaza and soldiers killed several Palestinians in the enclave as the four-day-old ceasefire between Israel and Hamas came under strain.
The restrictions — which Cogat, the Israeli body overseeing aid access to Gaza, told partners were due to Hamas’s delay in returning dead hostages — came a day after Donald Trump touted the end of the two-year war on a whistle-stop visit to the Middle East.
In a message to aid groups seen by the Financial Times, Cogat said it would allow only 300 aid trucks — half the number agreed under the US president’s peace deal — to enter the enclave on Wednesday. It added that no private sector deliveries would be allowed.
Israeli media reported that the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt would also remain closed.
Olga Cherevko, spokeswoman for the UN’s humanitarian arm OCHA, confirmed that it had received Cogat’s message and said the agency “continue[s] to encourage the parties to adhere to the agreement”.
Cogat did not respond to requests for comment.
The new limits on aid came hours after the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that six people were killed when Israeli drones fired on residents inspecting their homes in the Shuja’iyyah neighbourhood to the east of Gaza City.
The Israeli military said its troops had opened fire after “several” Palestinians approached the so-called yellow line, to which the Israeli army withdrew as part of the multi-stage peace deal put forward by Trump.
The killings came four days after a fragile ceasefire went into effect in Gaza, paving the way for a hostage and prisoner exchange on Monday that formed the first part of Trump’s plan to end what has become the deadliest war in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The fighting has cost the lives of nearly 68,000 Palestinians and nearly 2,000 Israelis, as well as reducing much of Gaza to rubble and causing a humanitarian catastrophe in the Palestinian enclave.
In an address to the Israeli parliament and at a subsequent summit in Egypt, Trump hailed what he said was a “historic dawn of a new Middle East” and predicted “the start of a grand concord and lasting harmony” between Israel and its neighbours.
The exchange began smoothly, with Hamas releasing the remaining 20 living hostages it held in Gaza, and Israel freeing nearly 2,000 Palestinians, including 250 prisoners serving life sentences and more than 1,700 Gazans it had seized and held without charge since the start of the war.
But later on Monday, the group representing the families of Israeli hostages accused Hamas of breaching the terms of the deal, after the militant group said it would initially hand over only four of the bodies of the 28 hostages who died on or since its October 7 2023 attack, which triggered the war.
The Israeli military said on Tuesday that it had identified the four bodies. It named two of them as Israeli hostage Guy Illuz and Nepali hostage Bipin Joshi and said it was not releasing the names of the other two as their families had not yet given their approval.
It said that Illuz died of injuries sustained on October 7 while being held captive without proper medical treatment, while Joshi — a student who had come to Israel to study agriculture — was probably murdered in captivity in the early stages of the war.
The military added that Hamas was “required to fulfil its part of the agreement and make the necessary efforts to return all the hostages to their families and to proper burial”. An international task force is due to help find the remaining bodies, some of which are thought to be buried under rubble.
