Two Israeli Soldiers Killed in Rafah in a Ceasefire Breach

Two Israeli soldiers were killed on Sunday morning when Hamas fighters fired an anti-tank missile and small-arms fire at Israeli troops in the Rafah area of southern Gaza, in violation of the ceasefire, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed.

The military named them as Major Yaniv Kola and Sergeant Itai Yavetz. A reserve soldier serving with the IDF's Gaza Division was seriously wounded in the same incident and taken to hospital; his family was notified.

Where the fighting happened

Rafah sits at the far southern end of the Gaza Strip, on the Egyptian border, and the part of it where the attack took place lies on the Israeli side of the line to which troops withdrew under the truce. Under the agreement brokered by the United States, Israeli forces pulled back to that line in October 2025, retaining control of roughly 53 per cent of the Strip, with all military operations (air, artillery and ground) suspended and the battle lines frozen, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The line was unmarked at first and Israel later began laying yellow-painted concrete blocks along it, according to a compiled account of the line, which gives the same figure for the share of Gaza behind it.

The truce was only days old. It required Hamas to hand back all 48 remaining hostages, 20 living and 28 dead, in exchange for 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and about 1,700 others detained after 7 October 2023; the living captives were released on 13 October, six days before this attack, while the return of the dead was still running well behind schedule, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Rafah was where much of the friction sat: Israeli engineering work continued on the Israeli side of the line while armed men remained in the tunnel network beneath it.

What followed the attack

This was the first fatal incident for Israeli troops since the ceasefire came into force just over a week earlier. Israeli reporting on the day described a cell emerging from a tunnel near Salah a-Din Road in south-eastern Rafah and firing at an engineering vehicle, with sniper fire wounding further personnel, and put the number of wounded at three. The IDF answered with dozens of air strikes across southern and central Gaza, including on a Hamas tunnel previously used to hold hostages, and Palestinian sources reported at least 21 people killed, the Times of Israel reported. The military then said it would resume enforcement of the ceasefire.

What is still unclear

The IDF statement gave no unit for the two men, no account of how the attackers reached the position, and no assessment of who ordered the attack: Hamas's central command or a local cell. It did not say whether the wounded reservist's condition had changed. Contemporaneous Israeli reporting differs from the statement on some particulars, describing rocket-propelled grenades fired at an excavator rather than an anti-tank missile, and giving a higher count of wounded.