An Israeli reservist soldier was killed in an attack carried out by Palestinian operatives against troops stationed in the Rafah area of the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday, the military announced Wednesday morning.
The attack took place during a ceasefire that began several weeks ago.
The Israel Defense Forces launched a wave of strikes on Hamas in response.
The slain soldier was named as Master Sgt. (res.) Yona Efraim Feldbaum, 37, a heavy machinery operator in the Gaza Division, from the West Bank settlement of Neria.
According to an initial IDF probe, enemy snipers fired at a building used by troops and at an army excavator operating in Rafah’s Jenina neighborhood at around 3:45 p.m.
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The gunfire killed Feldbaum, who was operating the excavator.
A short while later, the operatives fired several RPGs at the IDF forces, hitting an armored vehicle in the area but causing no additional injuries, according to the preliminary investigation.
In an immediate response, the IDF said it struck several targets in the area that posed a threat to its troops, including buildings and tunnel shafts.
Smoke rises after an Israeli strike in northern Gaza, as seen from southern Israel, October 29,2025 (FADEL SENNA / AFP)
The Jenina neighborhood is located on the eastern side of the Yellow Line that demarcates the military’s pullback in the Gaza Strip — an area under Israeli control under the ceasefire.
Despite the area being under Israeli control, the IDF has assessed that is a pocket of operatives holed up there. As troops have worked to clear the neighborhood of Hamas infrastructure — including a tunnel network — operatives have emerged from underground and attempted attacks.
Last week, two soldiers were killed in a similar attack in the same neighborhood, which prompted a wave of IDF airstrikes against Hamas.
Israel blamed Hamas for both attacks. The terror group has denied involvement.
On Tuesday evening, the Israeli Air Force conducted a wave of strikes across the Gaza Strip, with Hamas health authorities — which do not distinguish between civilians and combatants — reporting at least 60 dead.
The Aqsa Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah said at least 10 bodies, among them three women and six children, were brought in overnight after two Israeli airstrikes there. In southern Gaza, the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis said it received 20 bodies after five Israeli strikes in the area, of which 13 were children and two were women.
Elsewhere in central Gaza, the Al-Awda Hospital said it received 30 bodies of which 14 were children.
The IDF did not immediately provide details on the strikes.
An Israeli army flare drifts over an area in the northern Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, October 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the IDF to carry out “powerful strikes” in Gaza in response to Hamas’s violation of the ceasefire, including the killing of the soldier and the terror group’s failure to return the 13 remaining bodies of hostages as agreed in the ceasefire deal reached earlier this month.
Israel has accused Hamas of multiple violations of the deal, and has charged that the terror group knows the location of the vast majority, or even all, of the remaining bodies of hostages, and is purposely stalling and staging fake discoveries of bodies.
On Monday night, Hamas handed over partial remains it claimed belonged to one of the 13 hostages whose bodies are still in Gaza, but were later discovered by Israel to belong to a hostage who was recovered by Israeli troops in December 2023.
The military released footage showing Hamas staging the fake recovery of those remains, bringing them out of a building and placing them in a large hole operatives had dug in the ground in the Shejaiya neighborhood of Gaza City. They then covered the body bag in dirt and pretended to uncover it for the first time in front of the Red Cross.
Hamas operatives are seen staging the ‘recovery’ of the remains of a hostage in Gaza City, October 27, 2025. (Israel Defense Forces)
Separately, the military wing of the Hamas terror group announced on Tuesday night that it managed to “retrieve” the bodies of two hostages in the Gaza Strip earlier in the day, although it did not hand them over to Israel.
The Al-Qassam Brigades named the two hostages it claimed to have found on Tuesday. Israeli media outlets generally refrain from publishing the names until the families of the hostages have been notified.
Earlier Tuesday, Hamas said it had located the body of a hostage in a tunnel in southern Gaza, and planned to hand it over to Israel at 8 p.m. Hamas later said it was postponing the handover due to Israel’s own “violations” of the ceasefire.
Agencies contributed to this report.
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