Israeli ‘double-tap’ air strike responsible for killing schoolboy in Gaza 

An Israeli “double-tap” air strike killed two people, including a 15-year-old boy, in Gaza City on Tuesday, despite the US-brokered “ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas in October last year.

An Israeli drone targeted a group of Palestinians in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, north of Gaza City. Israeli forces claimed they were targeting Hamas operatives.

A “double-tap” strike maximises casualties by bombing a location once, waiting for other people to arrive at the scene to render assistance, and then bombing it again.

The initial attack on Tuesday injured Palestinian Civil Defence paramedic Sharif Shadi Labad, who lay struggling for his life on the ground amidst buildings that had been destroyed.

Footage posted by Palestinian accounts and verified by Al Jazeera then showed a group of Palestinians running to rescue Labad when another drone flying overhead targeted the same place where Labad lay. The weapon is believed to have been a Mikholit, an Israeli-developed guided glide bomb.

The second attack killed 15-year-old schoolboy Mohammad Abdul Zinati, one of the group of people who tried to assist the paramedic, and wounded a number of others, according to Palestinian outlet Shehab News. The boy’s father later said he was returning home from school when the attack took place.

Video showed the body of Zinati on the ground covered in a white shroud outside al-Shifa Hospital after the attack, as his father bid him an emotional farewell, saying in Arabic: “God is sufficient for me, and he is the best disposer of affairs” and reciting the Quran.

In footage verified by Al Jazeera, locals and Civil Defence members held a photo of Labad during a funeral procession that featured his body covered in a white shroud on a gurney, chanting: “Oh martyr, rest, rest. We continue the struggle.”

This is far from the first time Israeli forces have targeted areas of Gaza since the “ceasefire” was announced in October 2025.

Since then, at least 1,381 people have been killed in Gaza and 4,757 others have been wounded in near-daily attacks. Overall, since the start of Israel’s genocidal war in October 2023, at least 73,795 people have been killed and 174,869 others wounded.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry on Wednesday, six people had been killed, and 71 others injured in Israeli attacks on the besieged enclave in the previous 24 hours alone.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) also reported last month that more than 64,000 children were killed or injured in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and October 7, 2025.

“A ceasefire that leaves an average of one child dead each and every day is failing children,” UNICEF Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa Edouard Beigbeder said last month.

“With hundreds more children injured, many severely, children in Gaza are still waiting for the end to the violence they were promised.”

Israel’s double-tap attacks have been used throughout the course of its war on Gaza. They are particularly controversial because while the first attack is intended to kill an individual or individuals, the second kills first responders.

In August 2025, a double-tap attack on a wing of the Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza killed 20 people, including health workers and six journalists, one of whom was Al Jazeera’s photographer Mohammad Salama.

An investigation by the Israeli news outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call in July last year, based on conversations with five Israeli security sources, testimonies from Palestinian eyewitnesses and rescue personnel, found that the Israeli army had adopted the practice of double-tap strikes to “increase the likelihood that a target will die”.

“Sources say the double-tap procedure is usually employed during ‘imprecise’ air strikes when the army is unsure if it hit the intended target or whether the target was present at all,” the investigation found.

The Health Ministry warned on Wednesday that Gaza’s health system was on the verge of “total collapse” as Israel continues to limit the amount of medical aid and fuel permitted to enter the Palestinian territory.

The ministry called on the UN Security Council, the World Health Organization, and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) to act immediately, as the lack of fuel and medical supplies risks even more deaths.

On Wednesday, Gaza’s Civil Defence agency issued an urgent plea to international bodies over the brutality of Israeli attacks on the enclave after a building that the war had damaged collapsed in Gaza City, killing at least 20 people, including women and children.