Israel strikes Gaza after Netanyahu accuses Hamas of breaching ceasefire

Israeli warplanes struck Gaza on Tuesday night, shortly after Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ordered the military to carry out “powerful strikes” in Gaza, in the most serious test of the increasingly shaky US-brokered ceasefire.
Witnesses reported seeing Israeli planes launch strikes on Gaza City, as well as explosions across the strip shortly after Netanyahu’s announcement. At least seven people were killed in separate strikes in Gaza City and Khan Younis, including two children, medical sources said.
The sudden outbreak of violence was the most significant challenge of the 18-day ceasefire in Gaza. The US vice-president, JD Vance, tried to downplay the fighting, saying the ceasefire would hold.
Netanyahu ordered the strikes after a firefight between Palestinian militants and Israeli troops, as well growing fury over Hamas turning over body parts of a hostage whose remains Israeli troops had recovered two years before. The Israeli prime minister called an emergency meeting to discuss what he called Hamas violations of the ceasefire, amid clamour for a return to the war by far-right figures in the Israeli government.
The bombardment prompted Hamas to delay a planned handover of a hostage’s remains, which had been scheduled for Tuesday night.
Israeli media said Hamas militants had attacked Israeli troops in southern Gaza with an anti-tank missile and guns earlier on Tuesday. Hamas denied responsibility for the attack and said in a statement that it remained committed to the ceasefire deal.
An Israeli military official told Reuters that the attack violated the ceasefire as it was carried out east of the agreed withdrawal line of Israeli forces.
Israel Katz, Israel’s defence minister, said that Hamas would “pay many times over” for attacking Israeli soldiers and for failing to turn over hostages’ remains. “The attack on IDF soldiers in Gaza today by the Hamas terror organisation crosses a glaring red line to which the IDF will respond with great force,” Katz said in a statement.
Israel notified the US before launching the strikes, two US officials told the Associated Press.
The ceasefire, which started on 10 October, has held up until now, despite similar incidents of violence in recent weeks. US officials have made it clear they do not want a return to fighting in Gaza and have sent a series of officials to Israel over the past week, in what Israeli media has sardonically dubbed “Bibisitting.”
The US vice-president, JD Vance, said that he thought the ceasefire would hold despite Tuesday’s fighting. “That’s doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be little skirmishes here and there,” Vance told reporters.
Earlier on Tuesday, Netanyahu accused Hamas of a “clear violation” of the US-brokered Gaza ceasefire, saying the militant group had returned body parts of a hostage whose remains Israeli troops had recovered two years before.
Under the terms of the ceasefire, Hamas is required to return the remains of all Israeli hostages as soon as possible. In exchange, Israel has agreed to hand over 15 Palestinian bodies for each Israeli. Hamas has yet to return 13 bodies.
In a statement on Tuesday, Hamas said that the latest order to strike Gaza would further delay efforts to recover hostages’ remains.
Hamas has also accused Israel of violating the ceasefire, with the Gaza media office saying Israel has violated the deal more than 80 times, killing at least 80 people since the truce came into effect.
On Monday, the International Committee of the Red Cross accompanied members of Hamas inside areas of Gaza under the control of the Israeli military to facilitate the search for the bodies, after Donald Trump on Saturday issued a 48-hour ultimatum to return the remains of the dead Israeli hostages “quickly, or the other countries involved in this great peace will take action”.
In the evening, Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam brigades, said it had returned the body of an Israeli captive, with the Israeli government later confirming it had received it from the Red Cross.
However, on Tuesday, the Israeli health ministry’s National Forensic Institute said there was no match with any of the 13 missing bodies, saying the remains belonged to Ofir Tzarfati, whose body was recovered by the IDF in the Gaza Strip in December 2023, less than two months after his abduction.
The Israeli military published footage of what it said were members of Hamas reburying a body in order to “stage a false discovery” for the ICRC, which it said was the group “attempting to create a false impression of efforts to locate the bodies”. Hamas has yet to comment on the claims.
The news has enraged Israelis, with the far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich lashing out at Hamas and calling on Netanyahu to resume the war.
“The fact that Hamas continues to play games and does not immediately transfer all the bodies of our fallen, is in itself evidence that the terror organisation is still standing,” said Ben-Gvir, the security minister.
“Now we don’t need to ‘extract a price from Hamas’ for the violations. We need to exact from it its very existence and destroy it completely, once and for all, in accordance with the central goal defined for the ‘war of revival’ [war in Gaza],” he said, adding: “Mr prime minister, enough hesitation. Give the order.”
Smotrich, the finance minister, wrote to Netanyahu calling for “forceful responses” to Hamas’s violations and called for “the destruction of Hamas and the removal of the threat emanating from Gaza toward the citizens of Israel”.
It was unclear if the strikes ordered on Gaza would be accompanied by further punitive measures. The Times of Israel said the prime minister was considering moving the yellow line dividing Gaza in two to place more territory under IDF control, or halting the entry of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Hamas has so far returned the remains of 15 hostages, with 13 bodies still in the territory.
The militant group says it does not know the precise whereabouts of all the bodies, saying it has lost contact with several of its units that had been holding the captives and were reportedly killed during Israeli bombardments.
In a separate development on Tuesday, police said Israeli forces had killed three Palestinians they described as members of a “terrorist cell” during a raid near the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.