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Israel’s military has restarted fighting against Hamas in Gaza, ending a week-long truce that international mediators had hoped to extend to an eighth day.
“Hamas violated the operational pause, and in addition, fired towards Israeli territory,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement, following warning sirens near Gaza. “The IDF has resumed combat against the Hamas terrorist organisation in the Gaza Strip.”
The resumption of hostilities on Friday shattered a fragile truce between the warring sides that had allowed for the release of about 100 Israeli women and children and foreigners held hostage by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups, in exchange for about 240 Palestinian women and children freed from Israeli jails.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office on Friday accused Hamas of failing to meet its commitment to release “all the kidnapped women” and of firing rockets at Israel. The Israeli military said it was “currently striking Hamas terror targets” inside the strip.
Hamas did not claim responsibility for the rockets launched inside the Gaza strip towards Israel, but another militant faction Palestinian Islamic Jihad said that it had bombed Israeli towns “in response” to Israeli fire on Gaza earlier on Friday. Air raids and artillery strikes were immediately reported in Gaza after the truce broke down.
The Palestinian health ministry said Israeli strikes had killed 32 civilians and injured “tens” of mostly women and children within three hours of the truce’s end. Four children were named as being among nine people killed in southern Gazan city of Rafah, according to the Abu Youssef al-Najjar hospital. The Hamas-run Gaza government media office said civilian homes had been targeted in multiple air raids across the densely populated territory.
Qatar, which brokered the pause in hostilities with Egypt and the US, said negotiations between the two sides were continuing in a bid to return to the truce. But it warned that the bombing of Gaza “in the first hours after the end of the pause complicates mediation efforts and exacerbates the humanitarian catastrophe in the strip”.
In a statement, Doha called on the international community “to move quickly to stop the violence”.
Netanyahu’s office said it was resuming fighting in order to release hostages, “eliminate” Hamas and ensure “that Gaza will never again pose a threat to the people of Israel”.
“What Israel did not achieve in 50 days before the truce, it will not achieve by continuing its aggression after the truce,” said Ezzat al-Rashq, Hamas political bureau member, in a statement.
The truce, which was initially set for four days starting on November 24, was extended twice as Hamas offered to release more women and children in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons and increased deliveries of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
But the pause in hostilities frayed following the killing of three Israelis at a bus stop in Jerusalem on Thursday in an attack claimed by Hamas, and as the militants appeared to run out of Israeli women and children to release.
An official briefed on the negotiations said Hamas was struggling to find 10 women and children to hand over to Israel in line with the original agreement, which was based on about 10 Israeli hostages being freed each day.
“Mediators are trying to find a way to add more people to the remaining women and children and Hamas is trying to get more people to release,” the official said. “The push now is to add a secondary category of hostages to the women and children and speed up talks on a longer deal that would involve the release of soldiers.”
Hamas also suggested it was open to resuming the pause. Hamas political official Osama Hamdan told Al Jazeera on Friday that “we seriously sought and are still seeking the truce”.
But the militants are expected to ask for greater concessions in exchange for releasing the 140 remaining hostages, which include Israeli soldiers and reservists.
The fighting marks the end of a temporary respite for Gazan civilians, who had endured weeks of intense Israeli bombardment and a ground invasion triggered by Hamas’s October 7 attack on communities in southern Israel, in which the militant group killed 1,200 people and took about 240 hostages.
Palestinian officials said 14,800 people in Gaza had been killed in Israel’s assault and the UN estimated that 1.8mn people had fled their homes, creating a humanitarian crisis amid severe shortages of food, water, fuel and medicine.
Israel has sent text messages to Gazans listing areas they should evacuate. “The IDF will start a crushing military offensive . . . with the purpose of annihilating the terror organisation Hamas,” the messages read. “For your safety, move immediately.”
Israel’s offensive has focused on northern Gaza, but the military is expected to move south to where about 80 per cent of the strip’s population has fled. Western governments have been pressuring Israel to do more to protect civilians.
The IDF told people living in multiple neighbourhoods in southern Gaza, east of Khan Younis, as well as areas in northern Gaza, that they should move to what it described as “known shelters” in Rafah and what it called a “humanitarian area” in Muwasi.
Muwasi is a 14 sq km coastal area in south-western Gaza where Israel said it wants to declare a “safe zone”. But the UN has resisted the plan, arguing that a unilaterally-declared safe area could endanger civilians.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken said late on Thursday during a visit to Jerusalem that he had warned Netanyahu “that the massive loss of civilian life and displacement of the scale we saw in northern Gaza not be repeated in the south”.
Additional reporting by Neri Zilber in Tel Aviv.
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