Israel strikes Gaza on October 7 anniversary, three dead

People hold Israel flags at an event to commemorate the victims of Hamas's October 7 attack. [Odd Andersen, AFP]

Israel carried out new strikes in Gaza on Wednesday as it marked the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks by Hamas, with Palestinian officials reporting three people dead.

Loud bangs across the border in Gaza were audible from the site of the Nova music festival just as family members gathered at dawn to mourn the more than 300 revellers killed three years earlier.

In Gaza City, Al-Shifa hospital reported two people killed in an Israeli strike overnight.

Gaza's civil defence identified one of the dead as Mohamed Tamous and said he was a volunteer for the agency, which serves as an emergency rescue service under Hamas.

The Israeli military said it struck and killed "two Hamas terrorists who had exited Kamal Adwan Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip," adding that one had "planted explosives... in the area of the Yellow Line with the intention of harming IDF troops."

The so-called Yellow Line demarcates the areas under Hamas and Israeli military control in the Gaza Strip.

The military identified one of those killed in the strike as Tamous, whom it said was a sniper in Hamas's military wing while simultaneously working for the civil defence.

In the southern city of Khan Yunis, Nasser Hospital said that a 60-year-old man, Hisham Ibrahim Abu Mustafa, was killed in an Israeli strike and that others were injured.

On the third anniversary of the first day of the war in Gaza, living conditions remain dire in the coastal Palestinian territory, despite a US-brokered ceasefire that came into effect in October 2025.

"After three years of siege, killing and destruction, Israel has turned the Gaza Strip into an uninhabitable place," said Gaza City resident Mahmoud Abu Hasira.

Beneath the rubble

Hundreds of thousands of displaced people still live in tent cities and makeshift shelters that sprawl on beaches or next to piles of rubble from bombed-out residential buildings.

"We once had homes, but now we have lost our loved ones, whose bodies still lie beneath the rubble," said Bassam Nasser, a resident of Beit Hanoun, a now largely destroyed city in Gaza's north, who was displaced in the early days of the war.

Israel says it controls about 60 percent of Gaza, on the territory's outer perimeter including Beit Hanoun, while most of the Palestinian population lives in the remaining Hamas-controlled areas.

Though Israel eased its restrictions on aid trucks entering Gaza after the ceasefire, Ahmed Nasser, another resident of Gaza City, told AFP that life remained desperately hard.

"The war and the famine have left us hungry, fearful and displaced, living in tents and struggling with soaring prices," he said.

Israel's military offensive has displaced nearly the entire population of Gaza and killed more than 74,200 people, according to Gaza's health ministry, which is under Hamas authority and whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations.

Since the ceasefire was declared last October, Israeli forces have killed more than 1,460 people in Gaza, according to the ministry.