More than two months ago, Israel and Hamas signed a cease-fire agreement that offered Palestinians in Gaza a hope of respite after a punishing two-year Israeli bombardment that left much of their enclave in ruins.

The destruction has continued.

Israel has demolished more than 2,500 buildings in Gaza since the cease-fire began, according to a New York Times analysis of satellite imagery from Planet Labs. It says it is destroying tunnels and booby-trapped homes.

This is what Israel’s actions look like. A nighttime video from Oct. 30, when the cease-fire was in effect, shows what appears to be a large-scale controlled demolition in a part of Shejaiya, a neighborhood in Gaza City, that is under Israeli military control.

As part of the cease-fire agreement reached earlier that month, the Israeli military withdrew its forces beyond an agreed-upon boundary inside Gaza, represented on maps published by Israel as a yellow line. That left Israel in control of about half of the enclave.

Most of the demolitions since the cease-fire began have been in those Israeli-controlled areas.

But dozens of buildings have been destroyed beyond the yellow line in areas effectively under Hamas control, where the Israeli military had agreed to halt its operations.

In satellite images taken shortly after the truce, clusters of intact buildings can be seen in the Shejaiya neighborhood, which spans the yellow line. Shots of the same area months later show that it has largely been reduced to wasteland. And scores of buildings, the images show, were destroyed beyond the yellow line, in some cases as far as 900 feet over.

Many of the structures were likely to have already been severely damaged after two years of Israeli bombardment. A United Nations assessment found that, as of Oct. 11, more than 80 percent of Gaza’s structures were damaged or destroyed. The people who lived in them are believed to have been displaced by successive evacuation orders and raging fighting.

Israeli officials say the widespread demolitions are happening as part of efforts to “demilitarize” Gaza. Since the cease-fire, they say the military has destroyed underground tunnels that were once used by militant groups, and has leveled buildings that were booby-trapped.

At the height of the war, which began after Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the Israelis estimated that the tunnel network spanned hundreds of miles, with thousands of entrances. Hamas has used the tunnels to store weapons, hide hostages and stage ambushes of Israeli soldiers.

Many Palestinians in Gaza argue that Israel has been flattening entire neighborhoods, with little regard for those who once lived or owned property there. Given the extent of the tunnel network, they say they fear that if Israel tries to dismantle it all, many more of the remaining structures in the territory could be imperiled.

Niveen Nofal, 35, who lived in Shejaiya before being forced to move, said she felt a deep sense of loss to learn that Israel was leveling her neighborhood. “Our hopes and dreams have been turned into mounds of rubble,” she said.

The scale of ongoing destruction is stark. Across eastern Gaza, in areas under Israeli control, satellite imagery reveals that entire blocks have been erased since the cease-fire, as well as swaths of farmland and agricultural greenhouses.

“Israel is wiping entire areas off the map,” said Mohammed al-Astal, a political analyst based in Gaza. “The Israeli military is destroying everything in front of it — homes, schools, factories and streets. There’s no security justification for what it’s doing.”

An Israeli military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under military rules, said Israel was not indiscriminately knocking down buildings. He said they sometimes collapsed when Israeli soldiers detonated explosives in the tunnels beneath them.

The official acknowledged that the military was carrying out demolitions on both sides of the yellow line, but said that Israeli ground forces had not crossed the line to do so. The Times was unable to verify that claim.

He also said that the Air Force was striking structures that posed a threat to Israeli soldiers, and that some of these were adjacent to the yellow line. Some tunnels, he said, traverse the withdrawal line, so detonating them could cause buildings on either side of it to collapse.

President Trump’s 20-point plan for ending the Gaza war, which formed the basis for the cease-fire, said that “all military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapons production facilities, will be destroyed.” But Israel and Hamas also agreed to suspend “all military operations, including aerial and artillery bombardment.”

One former Israeli military official questioned the scope of the demolition.

“This is absolute destruction,” said Shaul Arieli, who commanded forces in Gaza in the 1990s. “It’s not selective destruction, it’s everything.”

Classified maps from the Israeli military intelligence directorate show an expansive tunnel network in the Shejaiya area and scores of locations where the military believes militants have booby-trapped homes and roads.

The Israeli military allowed The Times to view those maps, which it said were produced for soldiers deployed in Gaza. The Times could not independently verify the accuracy of the maps.

Husam Badran, a senior Hamas official in Qatar, said the Israeli demolitions were violating the cease-fire agreement.

“The agreement isn’t vague, it’s clear,” he said in an interview. “Destroying people’s homes and property isn’t allowed. They’re hostile actions.”

Israeli officials have said that the military will continue carrying out the demolitions “until the last tunnel,” as the defense minister, Israel Katz, put it in a post on social media in November. “If there are no tunnels,” Mr. Katz wrote,” there is no Hamas.”

Ashraf Nasr, 32, who lived in Shejaiya before being displaced, said he was filled with sadness to see his hometown pulverized.

“Our memories have been erased,” he said. “But Hamas gave Israel the pretext to carry out this disaster. It militarized civilian spaces.”

Residents of a Kurdish neighbourhood in Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo, have passed through government checkpoints to find blackened walls, burned-out vehicles and debris-strewn streets.

They returned home on Sunday after days of deadly clashes.

The fighting, which erupted in Kurdish-majority neighbourhoods on Tuesday after the government and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the main Kurdish-led force in the country, failed to make progress on plans to integrate the SDF into the national army, killed dozens of people and displaced some 155,000, according to Syrian authorities.

The battles were the most intense since the fall of then-President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.

By Sunday, the government had taken full control of the two areas, having agreed to transfer SDF fighters from the districts to Kurdish autonomous regions in the country’s northeast.

The United Nations said it was trying to send more convoys to the neighbourhoods with food, fuel, blankets and other urgently needed supplies.

Federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, he said on Sunday.

In a video announcing the probe, Powell said the US justice department served the agency with subpoenas and threatened a criminal indictment over testimony he gave to a Senate committee about renovations to Federal Reserve buildings.

He called the probe “unprecedented” and said he believed it was opened due to him drawing Donald Trump’s ire over refusing to lower interest rates despite repeated public pressure from the president.

The Fed chair is the latest to come at odds with Trump and then face criminal investigation by the US justice department.

The BBC has contacted the justice department and the White House for comment.

“This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions, or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation,” Powell said.

“I have deep respect for the rule of law and for accountability in our democracy. No one, certainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve is above the law, but this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration’s threats and ongoing pressure,” he went on to say.

Trump said in an interview with NBC News on Sunday that he did not have any knowledge of the Justice Department’s investigation into the Fed.

“I don’t know anything about it, but he’s certainly not very good at the Fed, and he’s not very good at building buildings,” he said of Powell.

The Fed is undertaking the first renovation of two buildings, the Eccles and 1951 Constitution Avenue buildings, since their construction in the 1930s.

The “overhaul and modernisation” of the buildings includes health and safety work such as the removal of asbestos and lead contamination.

The Fed has said that the renovations will reduce its costs over time. But Trump has criticised the ballooning costs of the project, arguing it will cost $3.1bn (£2.3bn), much higher than the Fed’s $2.5bn (£1.9bn) forecast.

The probe, which prosecutors have not confirmed, would signal a fresh escalation in Trump’s ongoing dispute with Powell, who the president nominated for the role as Fed chair in 2017.

It comes as the president is expected to name Powell’s successor as chair by the end of the month.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to remove Powell, who he has criticised for not cutting interest rates as quickly as the president would have liked. In the second half of 2025, the Fed cut interest rates three times.

The president has consistently blamed his predecessor, Joe Biden, and interest rates for inflation and costs in the US.

Critics have raised concerns that Trump’s pressure to oust the Fed chair would muddy the institution’s authority to set interest rates independently from presidents.

North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican who is a member of the Senate Banking Committee, said he would oppose the nomination of Powell’s replacement by Trump, and any other Fed Board nominee, “until this legal matter is fully resolved”.

“If there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none,” Tillis said in a statement.

“It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question,” the senator said.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, said she believed Trump’s plan was to push Powell off the Fed board for good and “install another sock puppet to complete his corrupt takeover of America’s central bank”.

“This committee and the Senate should not move forward with any Trump nominee for the Fed, including Fed Chair,” she said.

Powell’s investigation will be overseen by the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, according to the New York Times, which first reported the probe.

April Larusse, head of investment specialists at Insight Investment, told the BBC’s Today programme that “it really isn’t the case that the Federal Reserve has been doing nothing on interest rates so this does feel like perhaps it is pressure that isn’t really justified”.

She added that Trump wants lower rates as “he is definitely trying to make sure that all parts of the economy benefit”.

“For people at the lower end of the income spectrum things have been difficult – inflation was very high, wages were not keeping up with inflation – and so there is a big part of the US population that frankly is still suffering with a cost of living crisis.”

The criminal probe into Powell, together with news of continued unrest in Iran, sparked a jump in the price of precious metals.

The price of gold – which is often seen a safer asset in times of uncertainty – was up 1.4% at $4,572.36 per ounce on Monday, having hit a record high of $4,600.33 earlier.

Silver also hit a record high – of $84.58 an ounce – before slipping back to $83.26 per ounce, a rise of 5.4% for the day.

Trump previously took aim at Lisa Cook, a governor at the US central bank, whom he tried to fire over alleged mortgage fraud.

The case was blocked by a US federal court and will be heard by the Supreme Court later this month.

Criminal charges brought by Trump’s justice department against political adversaries like New York Attorney General Letitia James, who brought a civil fraud case against Trump in 2024, and ex-Federal Bureau of Investigation boss James Comey were also dismissed by a court.

Comey was accused of making false statements and obstructing justice. He was fired by Trump during his first term after leading a probe into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, which Trump won over Hillary Clinton.

Both Comey and James have maintained their innocence and said the prosecutions were politically charged.