Gaza cease-fire collapses as Israel resumes combat operations : NPR

TEL AVIV, Israel — Israel’s warplanes began pounding targets in Gaza early Friday, shortly after the collapse of a cease-fire deal that had allowed the release of more than 100 hostages seized by Hamas militants and hundreds of Palestinians from Israeli jails.

Airstrikes in Rafah, near the Egyptian border, began just after 7 a.m. local time (midnight ET), with one hitting an apartment building near an open market. However, the full scope of the renewed bombardment was not immediately clear. A spokesman for the Gaza health ministry in the Hamas-controlled territory said that more than 30 Palestinians had been killed in the opening hours of renewed conflict.

The end of the truce and the resumption of fighting came hours after a seventh hostages-for-prisoners exchange between the two sides, and just as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was leaving Israel after high-level meetings, including with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Blinken had pressed Israel to further extend the temporary truce.

Israel’s military said it was restarting combat operations because Hamas “violated the operational pause…and fired toward Israeli territory.” Netanyahu’s office added that Hamas “did not live up to its duty to release all the kidnapped women today, and launched rockets at the citizens of Israel.”

“With the return to fighting we will emphasize: the Israeli government is committed to achieving the goals of the war — to release our hostages, eliminate Hamas and ensure that Gaza will never again pose a threat to the residents of Israel,” the prime minister’s office said.

The temporary cease-fire, which began a week ago, came after weeks of heavy bombardment by Israeli air and ground forces in response to an Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people, Israel says. Some 240 hostages, including Israelis and a number of foreign workers, were also seized from communities bordering Gaza.

Members of Hamas’ political bureau, issued a statement saying: “What Israel did not achieve during the fifty days before the truce, it will not achieve by continuing its aggression after the truce.” Osama Hamden, a senior Beirut-based Hamas official, told NPR that the Islamist militant group “tried till the very last minutes to negotiate an extension of the truce, but the (Israel) was not interested in that, and only interested in continuing its aggression on the Palestinian people.”

After hostilities resumed, Israel’s military issued a warning to Gazans that “Hamas uses the residents of the Gaza Strip as human shields, placing its command and military infrastructure in residential areas, hospitals, mosques, and schools.”

“Hamas turns civilian sites into military targets while using civilians and civilian facilities as a human shield,” the military said, issuing what it said was an interactive evacuation map for residents that divides the territory into “recognizable areas to enable the residents of Gaza to orient themselves and understand the instructions, and to evacuate from specific places for their safety if required.”

During the week-long pause in fighting, Hamas and other militants in Gaza released more than 100 hostages, most of them Israelis, in return for 240 Palestinians freed from prisons in Israel.

The truce also allowed desperately needed humanitarian aid to reach besieged Gaza, whose 2.2 million people had been under weeks of bombardment from Israeli airstrikes and a ground campaign that has killed at least 13,300 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

The original four-day cease-fire deal that began a week ago was twice extended for a total of three days to allow for the exchange of more captives. Israel had agreed to prolong the truce if Hamas turned over an additional ten hostages per day in exchange for 30 Palestinians. But on Thursday, in the final exchange under the extension, Hamas released only eight captives.

NPR’s Scott Neuman, Daniel Estrin and Brian Mann reported from Tel Aviv. NPR’s Anas Baba reported from Rafah, Gaza Strip.