Strike on a car near Deir al-Balah's water tower kills one, Gaza media say

A strike on a vehicle near Deir al-Balah, a city in the central Gaza Strip, killed one person and wounded several others on October 4, according to Palestinian media outlets cited by The Times of Israel. The Jerusalem-based news site attributed the strike to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Israel's military, and noted that the IDF had not yet responded.

The first Hebrew-language reports came earlier that morning. Abu Ali Express, a Telegram channel that tracks Arabic-language media, wrote that journalists in Gaza were reporting a death after a car was hit close to the water tower in Deir al-Balah. A later post from the same channel identified the dead man and said the car was a Skoda.

Who was reported killed

According to a follow-up post by Abu Ali Express, the man killed was Saqr al-Qisi, also known as Abu Nabil, a resident of Rafah, the city at the southern end of the Gaza Strip. The channel did not say why he was in Deir al-Balah or whether he was the intended target. No other report in the material names the victim, so the identification rests on that single channel.

The same post included video that, according to the channel, showed the car burning, with people taking pictures of themselves beside it. The channel's description of that footage was written in a mocking tone; this account relies only on its factual claims.

Conflicting figures on the wounded and the dead

The reports agree that a vehicle was struck in or near Deir al-Balah, but they do not agree on the number of casualties.

• The Times of Israel said one person was killed and that several others were hurt, without giving a number.
• Shehab News Agency, a Palestinian outlet whose post on X was embedded in the Times of Israel item, said one civilian was killed and 9 others were wounded.
• Abu Ali Express said one man was killed and that ten other people were injured.
• News.co.il, an Israeli news channel on Telegram, used the plural in its brief post, saying there were people killed in an airstrike on a vehicle in Deir al-Balah. Its report gave no figure and named nobody.

Only News.co.il described the attack as coming from the air. The other reports refer to a strike on a vehicle without specifying how it was carried out.

Where the strike took place

Deir al-Balah lies in the middle section of the Gaza Strip, between Gaza City to the north and Khan Younis and Rafah to the south. The Shehab post placed the strike around an area known locally as al-Hawouz, an Arabic word for a water reservoir or water tower, in the southern part of the city. That matches the Hebrew reports, which located the attack near the city's water tower.

How the reports were sourced

None of the organisations below had a reporter at the scene, as far as the material shows. Abu Ali Express and The Times of Israel both said they were relaying what Palestinian journalists and media in Gaza were saying. The Times of Israel described those outlets as operating in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Shehab News Agency, the most specific source on casualties, uses the language of Palestinian factions: its post referred to the strike as an attack by "the occupation" and described the dead man as having been martyred.

The figures and the identification therefore come from Palestinian sources in Gaza and from an Israeli channel monitoring them, and they had not been confirmed by the Israeli military in the reports available.

The wider picture that day

The strike was one item in a busy news day. The same Times of Israel live blog reported that crossings into the West Bank and Gaza were to be closed ahead of the Oct. 7 anniversary, the date of the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that started the Gaza war. The blog also carried a report that Iran's parliament speaker said the Strait of Hormuz would stay shut until Tehran's 7 conditions were met, and a report of settlers setting fire to a vehicle in the West Bank, with no injuries.

What the reports do not say

Several basic questions remain unanswered in the material available:

• The IDF had not commented, so there is no Israeli account of whether it carried out the strike, who or what it was aiming at, or why.
• No report explains who Saqr al-Qisi was beyond his name, nickname and home city, or whether he had any affiliation with an armed group.
• The number of wounded differs between sources, and one outlet suggests more than one person died. None of the reports cites a hospital or health official.
• The condition of the wounded is not described.
• The exact time of the strike is not given; the reports say only that it happened shortly before the first posts that morning.