The clock ticked down to a cautious calm around Haider Roundabout in western Gaza City, where a few vehicles moved along streets that now bore only memories of the asphalt.
At that moment, on the afternoon of April 28, 2026, residents were trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy amidst a fragile truce, before the silence was shattered by a horrific explosion that turned a Jeep into a blazing inferno of molten metal, instantly killing four people.
Wael Anshasi, an eyewitness who was walking near the site of the attack, recounted the terrifying details “We were walking safely when suddenly the occupation targeted the car right before our eyes. The area was completely safe and there was no military activity, but there is no safety anywhere in Gaza. We are living through harsh conditions: bombing, destruction, and siege, and even the specter of famine is beginning to haunt our children again.”
Wael adds, his voice filled with anguish as he looks at the pools of blood that cover the area, “They bombed the car suddenly while we were walking beside it as ordinary civilians.”
He points to what he calls the “lie of the truce”: “The bombing is everywhere, and the war is still raging, even though the media sometimes promotes a calmer situation. But the reality here screams otherwise. They killed journalists and aid workers to obscure the truth, and this targeting is a blatant violation of any talk of a ceasefire.”
This crime was just one link in a long chain of attacks targeting civilian vehicles in the Gaza Strip, which completely disregard the ceasefire agreement that has been in effect since last October. From mid-October 2025 until April 28, 2026, Al-Quds Al-Arabi documented more than eight direct attacks on civilian vehicles, in a policy that appears aimed at paralyzing aid efforts and terrorizing and isolating the remaining residents of the devastated Strip.
Just five days before the Haidar roundabout incident, specifically on April 23, a similar scene unfolded on Salah al-Din Street, north of the Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. An Israeli reconnaissance aircraft fired a missile directly at a civilian vehicle as it entered the camp, killing three civilians and leaving their bodies in pieces. The remains were then transported with great difficulty to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.
The incident occurred at the height of the movement of civilians using this main artery to travel between the central and southern parts of the Gaza Strip. This confirmed for observers that the occupation deliberately targets vehicles on main roads to sever the connections between the already besieged cities and transform every civilian movement into a death-defying adventure.
Targeting the shield of journalism and humanitarian work
On April 8, the coastal Rashid Street witnessed another crime. According to Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for the Civil Defense in Gaza, Israeli warplanes fired a missile directly at the car carrying the martyred journalist Mohammed Washah as he passed near the Nabulsi Junction.
8 incidents targeting civilian and aid vehicles in Gaza since October
The attack resulted in Weshah's immediate death after his car was completely engulfed in flames. Civil defense teams that rushed to the scene described the field conditions as "extremely difficult," as they raced against time to extinguish the fire and recover what remained of the body, amidst heavy Israeli warplane activity that continued to circle the area.
The tragedy of the World Health Organization
In one of the most serious incidents affecting international organizations, a World Health Organization (WHO) team was directly targeted on April 6, 2026. At 8:45 a.m. that day, Israeli occupation forces stationed east of Salah al-Din Street in Khan Younis opened heavy fire on a rented civilian vehicle and a small commercial bus traveling in the al-Satar al-Sharqi area.
The shooting resulted in the death of the driver, Majdi Aslan, 52, and injuries to three other workers who were passengers in the bus, which belonged to a commercial company.
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) notes that this medical team was traveling daily to the Al-Amal Hospital, run by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, to review the files of patients nominated to travel through the Rafah Crossing—a purely humanitarian and pre-announced route.
One of the injured reported that the bullets rained down on them “suddenly and directly,” despite the absence of any apparent threat, adding that they were on a humanitarian mission to distribute clothing to displaced orphans.
This incident prompted the World Health Organization to make the painful decision to suspend medical evacuations of patients through Rafah, in protest against the lack of protection, before resuming operations on April 12 after international promises that did not prevent the occupation’s bullets from continuing.
“Al-Mawasi”… the targeted security
The Al-Mawasi area, west of Khan Younis, which the occupation claims is a safe zone, was not spared from this pattern. On March 17, 2026, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society announced that the Al-Mawasi field hospital received three martyrs and twelve wounded as a result of a bombing that targeted a civilian vehicle.
According to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, the martyrs were Yahya Abu Labda, 14-year-old Tamer Baraka, and Hamed Muhi Al-Din Al-Samiri, in a crime that confirmed that the maps of "safe zones" are nothing but ink on paper.
The assassination of truth in Al-Zahraa
Going back to the beginning of the year, specifically January 21, 2026, an Israeli drone targeted a civilian vehicle belonging to the Egyptian Relief Committee while it was on a filming mission in the displaced persons camps in the city of Al-Zahra in the central Gaza Strip.
According to Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Civil Defense, speaking to Al-Quds Al-Arabi, the vehicle, which clearly displayed the committee's logo, was completely charred by the missile, resulting in the deaths of three journalists: Mohammed Qashta, Abdul Raouf Shaath, and Anas Ghneim. It was a direct attack on those who were reporting the truth, and an attempt to conceal the suffering inside the refugee camps.
Body parts at the Abbas intersection
In November 2025, medical sources at Al-Shifa Hospital documented the arrival of the remains of five martyrs who were killed after a civilian vehicle was targeted near the Abbas Junction, west of Gaza City.
The area, densely populated with displaced people, witnessed widespread anger as residents carried the victims in their torn clothes, amid cries condemning the international community's silence regarding the targeting of civilians in the heart of populated residential neighborhoods.
The Shaaban family: A sad start to the truce
The earliest incident documented in this report dates back to October 18, 2025, when Israeli occupation forces targeted the Shaaban family's vehicle in the Zeitoun neighborhood.
At the time, the Gaza Center for Human Rights stated that the airstrike resulted in the deaths of 11 civilians from the same family, the Shaaban family, including seven children and two women. The Center said that this behavior reflects a blatant disregard for civilian lives and a determination to continue the policy of killing, even under the supposed ceasefire.
Widespread violations and a lack of protection
These eight incidents are just the tip of the iceberg, representing only a small part of the record of violations, which, according to the Government Media Office in Gaza, amounted to about 2,750 violations since the ceasefire began on October 10, 2025, until May 1, 2026.
These operations systematically focus on targeting civilian objects and moving vehicles, which human rights observers see as an attempt to impose an undeclared "buffer zone" that impedes the movement of displaced persons and paralyzes the ability of medical and relief teams to save what can be saved, thus turning the "truce" into merely a name for a slow war of attrition waged by the occupation, the price of which is paid by Palestinian civilians with their blood and lost security.
