Israel Kills Dozens in Gaza Strikes Days After Trump Called Hamas Deal 'Historic'

Since Trump announced his July 30 plan calling for Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza alongside Hamas's disarmament, the fighting has continued and intensified.

Israeli airstrikes killed at least 25 to 26 Palestinians over the weekend of August 1-2, according to Palestinian health officials cited by Newsweek and Al Jazeera. August 2 was one of the deadliest single days in Gaza in recent weeks, according to Time. Reuters reported strikes hit Gaza City, Deir al-Balah, and Khan Younis on back-to-back days, killing at least 18 people on Sunday alone.

This is happening after Trump called the agreement a "historic" step and a "monumental" breakthrough. Hamas signed on to a framework that would disarm the group in phases and hand governance to a new body called the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, designed to replace both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

Israel's government isn't buying the optimism. Energy Minister Eli Cohen said flatly on Sunday: "In the deal we signed with the United States, our stance is that Hamas must be dismantled. This is the first thing that must happen." Cohen said Israel is "very skeptical" Hamas will actually give up its weapons.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office reinforced that position, according to ZeroHedge, stating troops will not withdraw before Hamas fully disarms. This contradicts the sequencing Trump laid out, where withdrawal and disarmament were framed as moving in parallel.

So Israel is bombing Gaza while insisting the deal's core condition—Hamas actually giving up its arsenal—hasn't been met. Hamas hasn't disarmed a single weapon as of today. Israel's strikes are targeting people it says are Hamas commanders and military operatives, according to Newsweek.

The gap between the announcement and the reality

Trump's team sold this as a done deal. It's not. What got signed is a framework with a lot of moving pieces and zero enforcement mechanism visible yet.

Israel has legitimate reasons to be skeptical. Hamas has broken ceasefires before. Handing full trust to a group that ran an armed insurgency for two decades on a promise to disarm "in phases" is a real risk, and Israeli officials are right to point that out. If Hamas keeps weapons hidden while Israel pulls back, that's a security disaster waiting to happen.

But the other side: continuing airstrikes that kill women and children while claiming to support a "peace deal" undercuts the deal's credibility before it's even implemented. You can't say you're for phased disarmament and then bomb the territory harder than before the ink dried. Euro-Med Monitor tracked the weekend death toll at 26, including women and children.

Where the coverage splits

ZeroHedge frames this as evidence the Trump administration oversold the deal and that Israel is actively sabotaging it, calling the bombardment a breach of the October ceasefire agreement. This is a defensible read given the timeline: announcement, then immediately more strikes, not fewer.

Time's framing, according to ground.news's aggregation, leans toward the same conclusion but adds that Israel has explicitly reaffirmed it won't withdraw before full Hamas disarmament, treating that as the operative Israeli position rather than a violation of anything. If Israel never agreed to withdraw first, calling the strikes a "breach" assumes a sequencing that Israel's own statements dispute.

Newsweek's headline, "Israel was presented with a peace deal in Gaza, it bombed it the next day," is sharper and more accusatory than the underlying facts fully support. Israel says these are targeted strikes on Hamas commanders, not indiscriminate bombardment. Whether that targeting claim holds up is unverified in these sources. Palestinian health officials, who count total casualties, are the source for the death toll, not an independent tally of who was actually a combatant.

None of the sources here provide verified information on how many of the dead were confirmed Hamas operatives versus civilians. Trump's plan depends on both sides actually stopping the killing while disarmament happens. Right now, neither side has done that, and there's no published timeline, monitoring body, or verification mechanism yet in place to check whether Hamas is disarming or whether Israel is targeting who it says it's targeting.

The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza hasn't taken over anything yet. Until it does, or until Hamas visibly hands over weapons, the deal Trump called historic remains a piece of paper both sides are interpreting to fit their own military decisions.