Israel strikes Gaza again after overnight bombardment that killed at least 104

Israel carried out another strike in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, killing at least two people, after bombarding the territory overnight and killing at least 104 Palestinians, including children, in the gravest challenge yet to the increasingly fragile US-brokered ceasefire. The Israeli military said it had struck military infrastructure where weapons were being stored for an imminent attack in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza. Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City said it had received two bodies from the strike. After the Tuesday night bombardment, Israel said that it was now adhering to the ceasefire again and statements from US officials seemed to indicate they did not consider the ceasefire to have been broken. But Wednesday’s strike cast doubt on Israel’s willingness to comply with the truce, which obligates both parties to stop their attacks. The strikes, some of the bloodiest attacks in the two-year war, killed at least 46 children and 20 women, and injured 200 people, according to Gaza’s civil defence agency. They took place hours after Donald Trump said nothing would jeopardise the ceasefire agreement. Interactive The Israeli military released an infographic showing 25 “terrorists” it had killed in Gaza over the past 24 hours, but did not explain the identity of the other 79 people it had killed. The strikes shattered the short-lived relief Palestinians had felt since the start of the ceasefire. Funerals were held for the victims of the latest attacks at hospitals across Gaza on Wednesday. Some had been carried into medical facilities in the arms of loved ones. “These are massacres,” said Haneen Mteir, who lost her sister and nephews and was attending a funeral outside Nasser hospital in southern Gaza. “They burned children while they were asleep,” she told the Associated Press. The Israeli military said in a statement that it would continue to uphold the ceasefire agreement but would respond “firmly to any violation”. The foreign ministry spokesperson, Oren Marmorstein, blamed Hamas for the strikes and attributed the high death toll to the group using civilians as human shields. Hamas said the strikes “revealed Israel’s intention to undermine the ceasefire and impose new realities by force”. It said it would continue to adhere to the agreement in a statement issued on Wednesday. The director of humanitarian support and international cooperation at Gaza’s civil defence agency, Dr Mohammed al-Mughir, said: “Among these attacks was the targeting of a cancer patient camp, the Insan camp.” Mohammed al-Munirawi, a reporter for Palestine Newspaper, was among the dead, bringing the number of journalists killed by Israel in Gaza to 256, the territory’s media office said. The death toll was confirmed by an Agence France-Presse (AFP) tally of reports from medical officials at five Gaza hospitals that received the dead and wounded. Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the strikes on Tuesday evening after a firefight between Palestinian militants and Israeli troops, and amid growing anger over Hamas turning over body parts of a hostage whose remains Israeli troops had recovered two years before. The bombardment prompted Hamas, which denied responsibility for the gun attack, to delay a planned handover of another hostage’s remains, which had been scheduled for Tuesday night. Trump, speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Wednesday, said nothing would jeopardise the ceasefire but that Israel “should hit back” if its soldiers were killed. “They killed an Israeli soldier. So the Israelis hit back. And they should hit back,” he said. The US vice-president, JD Vance, said earlier that the ceasefire was holding despite “skirmishes”. However, Tuesday night’s attack exposed all the frailties of a ceasefire that from the outset has been marred by violence. Before the latest overnight strikes, Gaza’s media office accused Israel of having committed 80 violations since the ceasefire began, killing 97 Palestinians and injuring 230. Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, said intensive diplomatic efforts were being made to ensure the ceasefire did not collapse. He said that challenges were to be expected and that both sides acknowledged the agreement must hold. The Gaza civil defence spokesperson Mahmoud Bassal described the situation in Gaza as “catastrophic and terrifying”, calling the strikes “a clear and flagrant violation of the ceasefire agreement”. He told AFP: “The Israeli strikes targeted tents for displaced people, homes and the vicinity of a hospital in the strip.” A spokesperson for the IDF, when asked if the strikes were a resumption of the full-scale invasion, said on Tuesday that the military “can’t elaborate on the scale yet”. On Wednesday the IDF said it had reinstated the Gaza ceasefire. 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 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which it said was Hamas “attempting to create a false impression of efforts to locate the bodies”. Hamas has yet to comment on the claims. The video prompted condemnation from the ICRC, which said in a statement that it was “unacceptable that a fake recovery was staged”. 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. “Once again, Hamas murders one of our soldiers during a ‘ceasefire,’ and once again, the prime minister chooses to conclude the incident with a ‘measured response’ and an immediate return to the ceasefire, while continuing to allow in ‘humanitarian’ aid, instead of returning to full-scale war,” Ben-Gvir wrote on X. Under the ceasefire agreement, which took effect on 10 October, 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 so far returned the remains of 15 hostages, with 13 bodies still in the territory. The militant group has said 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. Although Trump has conceded that some of the bodies are difficult to reach, he said “others they can return now and for some reason they are not”. “It may have to do with the disarming of Hamas,” he added. Israel has made Hamas’s disarmament a central objective, describing it as a key condition for bringing an end to the two-year war. On Sunday, Hamas’s chief negotiator, Khalil al-Hayya, said the group’s weapons were “tied to the existence of occupation and aggression”. He said: “If the occupation ends, these weapons will be handed over to the state.” It remained unclear whether he was alluding to the still-unformed Palestinian governing authority expected to take over Gaza’s administration once Hamas relinquishes control.