The Ceasefire That Keeps Producing Strikes — 11 Months, 26 Kilometers of Tunnels, and a String of Dead Hamas Commanders.
On Sept. 2, 2026, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud) stood at an Israeli army outpost along Gaza’s “Yellow Line” and announced that the IDF had destroyed more than 26 kilometers of Hamas tunnel infrastructure in the eleven months since the ceasefire took effect. It read like routine wartime bookkeeping — one more entry in a running demilitarization tally.
It is not quite that simple. The 26-kilometer figure is genuinely this week’s news. Two other episodes anchoring this story are not: the killing of Hamas weapons chief Raed Saed and a January strike tied to a hostage-recovery search both happened months earlier. Read honestly, together they are not one news cycle — they are eleven months of evidence that the ceasefire which ended the shooting war on Oct. 10, 2025, has kept producing IDF strikes on Hamas commanders and infrastructure ever since, on a rolling basis, each one tied to a specific trigger.
Israel calls this enforcement — demilitarization required by the ceasefire’s own terms. Hamas and Gaza officials call much of it a violation. A U.S.-run monitoring center in southern Israel tracks both sides’ compliance, and even an official inside the peace process has publicly questioned whether the strikes are working. Both readings appear below, sourced to the people making them.
- 26+ kmof Hamas tunnels the IDF says it destroyed east of the Yellow Line since the ceasefire began — disclosed Sept. 2, 2026, per i24NEWS / The Jerusalem Post
- 83%of tunnels inside the IDF-held zone destroyed, per Defense Minister Israel Katz, July 2026
- 60–70%of Gaza under Israeli control or restriction — competing figures from Netanyahu (60%), UN OCHA (64.9%, June 2026), and Netanyahu's own May 28 order to reach 70%
- 3,795alleged ceasefire violations logged by Gaza's Government Media Office since October 2025, per Al Jazeera
- 1,168Palestinians the same Gaza source says have been killed since the ceasefire began
- ~150U.S. troops staffing the Civil-Military Coordination Center in Kiryat Gat that formally monitors ceasefire compliance
Netanyahu’s Sept. 2 stop was at an outpost on the Yellow Line itself — the demarcation line the IDF pulled back to under the ceasefire, not a full withdrawal, and one that still leaves Israel holding roughly 60% of Gaza eleven months later. IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir, Southern Command chief Maj.-Gen. Yaniv Asor, and 7th Armored Brigade commander Col. Elad Zuri joined him at the outpost.
“We control 60% of the Strip, and there is more to come because we are eliminating the terrorists who threaten us.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud) · Sept. 2, 2026
The 26-kilometer tunnel figure was the substance of the visit. Per i24NEWS, IDF engineers work through a fixed sequence: map the tunnel, collapse it with explosives, pump concrete into the void, then seal the entrance under debris. The work has been carried out east of the Yellow Line by the Northern Gaza Brigade’s combat-engineering forces — the Yahalom unit — under the IDF’s 99th Division, continuously since the ceasefire began. Defense Minister Israel Katz said in July that 83% of tunnels inside the IDF-held zone had already been destroyed.
Background — an earlier post from the same tunnel-clearing campaign, not this week’s disclosure:
WATCH: A Hamas terror tunnel in northern Gaza, stretching hundreds of meters, has been located and dismantled by IDF combat engineers.
The tunnel tally announced Sept. 2 did not start with a single disclosure; its clearest earlier chapter is Raed Saed. Back in December 2025 — not this week — the IDF killed Saed, head of Hamas’s weapons-manufacturing network inside the Qassam Brigades and, at the time, second only to Hamas military chief Izz al-Din al-Haddad. Al-Haddad was himself killed in a later Israeli strike, on May 15, 2026 — the chain of command Saed answered to in December no longer exists.
Hours before the Dec. 13 strike, a Hamas-planted explosive device wounded two IDF soldiers in the Yellow Line area of southern Gaza. Saed was killed hours later in a vehicle strike near the Nabulsi junction on the Rashid coastal road in western Gaza City, after emerging from the city’s tunnel network; Gaza health authorities said four to five people died in the strike and roughly 25 were wounded.
Hamas Gaza chief Khalil al-Hayya confirmed Saed’s death on Dec. 14 and called it a ceasefire violation — but rather than threaten retaliation, he appealed to mediators and to President Trump to “reinforce the agreement.” That response set the pattern for nearly every strike since: protest through diplomatic channels, not renewed fighting.
The pattern repeated in January — again, not this week. On Jan. 8, 2026, the IDF said it targeted a senior Hamas figure in the Tuffah and Jaffa Road area of Gaza City after gunmen fired on Israeli troops who were searching for the remains of hostage Ran Gvili. Israeli forces recovered Gvili’s remains 18 days later, on Jan. 26, in an operation named “Brave Heart.”
Like the Saed strike a month before it, the January operation followed a specific trigger — an attack on Israeli forces — rather than a scheduled sweep. Two strikes, one month apart, establish the template this story is built on: Hamas activity Israel frames as a ceasefire breach, answered by a targeted IDF strike, which Gaza officials then frame as a breach running the other direction.
Israel’s own language treats strikes like the one on Saed as enforcement, not violation. Katz’s joint statement on the strike said Saed “operated to reestablish Hamas’ capabilities and weapons manufacturing, a blatant violation of the ceasefire” — locating the breach in Hamas’s rearming, not in Israel’s response to it. IDF spokesman Effie Defrin has made the same case in briefings on the ceasefire’s terms.
Israel’s count: 26+ kilometers of tunnels destroyed since the ceasefire began; 83% of tunnels inside the IDF-held zone destroyed as of July 2026 — both figures from the IDF and Defense Minister Katz.
Gaza’s count: 3,795 alleged ceasefire violations and 1,168 Palestinians killed since October 2025 — both figures from Gaza’s Government Media Office, relayed by Al Jazeera.
Neither ledger has been independently verified by a neutral party. Both are reported here as each side’s own claim.
Roughly 150 U.S. troops from CENTCOM staff a Civil-Military Coordination Center in Kiryat Gat, built into the ceasefire’s own architecture to monitor compliance from both sides. Even inside that architecture, the strikes have drawn criticism. Nikolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace’s high representative for the Trump-brokered peace plan, said in August that Israel’s continued strikes “have not, and will not, lead to Hamas’s disarmament” — a rare critical note from inside the process meant to produce that outcome.
The disarmament framework Mladenov was assessing traces to a Board of Peace agreement President Trump announced on Truth Social on July 30.
Today, the Board of Peace reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza... The threat that emerged from Gaza on October 7 will NOT be allowed to rebuild!
Trump announces the Hamas disarmament framework the current Yellow Line enforcement operations sit under.
The Yellow Line itself has not stayed put. UN OCHA measured Israeli-controlled or -restricted territory at 64.9% of Gaza by June 2026. Netanyahu ordered a push toward 70% control on May 28. By Sept. 2 he was citing a lower figure — 60% — while promising “more to come.” The gap between 60%, 64.9%, and a 70% target has not been reconciled publicly; each number is reported here exactly as its source stated it. Al Jazeera has described the line’s forward movement as a “creeping” form of territorial control. Israel disputes that characterization, framing every move instead as a security necessity tied to demilitarization rather than annexation.
IDF has destroyed over 26 kilometers of Hamas tunnel infrastructure east of the Yellow Line since the ceasefire began in October 2025.
Eleven months in, the shape of this ceasefire is legible: a shrinking map for Hamas, a rising tunnel count for the IDF, and a violation-and-casualty tally that Gaza officials say is rising too — all inside a peace process even its own architects are starting to publicly doubt.
Eleven months after the October 2025 ceasefire, the IDF says it has destroyed more than 26 kilometers of Hamas tunnels and now controls roughly 60% of Gaza. That record includes strikes that killed senior Hamas figures in December and January — evidence of a pattern, not a single week’s news. Israel calls the campaign demilitarization required by the ceasefire itself; Gaza officials count thousands of alleged violations and more than a thousand dead on their side of the ledger. Even the peace plan’s own monitor has questioned whether it is working.
