Israel Resumes Attacks in Gaza After Stalled Cease-Fire Talks with Hamas

News Analysis

With Cease-Fire Talks Stalled, Israel Puts War Back on the Table

While the Israeli government has stopped short of a ground invasion for now, its new strikes in Gaza seem to be an effort to force concessions from Hamas.

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By Patrick Kingsley and Ronen Bergman

Reporting from Tel Aviv

For weeks, Israel and Hamas had been locked in fruitless negotiations to extend the fragile cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and exchange more Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners.

The talks stalled because Hamas refused to release significant numbers of hostages unless Israel promised to permanently end the war — a commitment Israel would not make unless Hamas agreed to give up power in Gaza.

Now, Israel appears to have returned to war in an attempt to crush Hamas’s hopes of retaining control of the territory.

Israel’s heavy aerial attacks on Gaza early on Tuesday stopped short of an immediate ground invasion. But they could develop into a full ground operation if Hamas refuses to give up control of Gaza, according to two Israeli military officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak more freely.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has already reaped domestic rewards from the strikes. Hours after they began, a far-right party rejoined Mr. Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, bolstering the government’s fragile majority in Parliament, weeks after it left the alliance to protest the initial truce.

In Gaza, the strikes have served as a brutal reminder to Hamas of the destruction that it and Gaza’s civilian population face if the group doesn’t back down. The strikes killed hundreds, according to the Gazan Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, in one of the highest nightly tolls in months. Israel’s military also ordered residents in two Palestinian border villages to flee their homes, hinting at the possibility of an Israeli invasion there in the coming days.

By making missile strikes instead of immediately beginning such a ground operation, Israel was seeking “to push Hamas to show more flexibility,” said Michael Milstein, an Israeli analyst of Palestinian affairs and a former senior officer in Israeli military intelligence. “The big question,” he said, “is how Hamas will respond.”

“Personally I don’t think it’s likely Hamas will be ready to give up their red lines,” Mr. Milstein said. “I’m quite concerned that within a few days we will find ourselves in a limited war of attrition: ongoing airstrikes but no readiness from Hamas to give up.”

If that remains the case, the Israeli officials said, Israel could potentially capture and exert more formal control over large parts of the territory. That would constitute a strategy that Israel avoided during earlier phases of the war.

The military also aims to kill senior Hamas administrators who were not previously viewed as high-priority targets, the officials said, in a bid to signal to Hamas that Israel will not allow the group to retain control of Gaza. Hamas’s government media office announced that four of the most senior civilian administrators and security chiefs in the territory were killed in the Israeli strikes.

“This is just the beginning,” Mr. Netanyahu warned in a speech hours later. “We will keep fighting to achieve all of the war’s objectives.”

By Tuesday evening, 16 hours after the Israeli assault began, Hamas still had not fired back, though it did call on Palestinians to step up attacks in the West Bank and vowed an immediate response from Gaza. It was not clear whether that was because its military capabilities were too degraded in the earlier phases of the war, or because it sought to avoid a stronger response from Israel.

Either way, it showed no public signs of backing down in the negotiations. In statements to the news media, Hamas harshly criticized the strikes, dismissing Israeli claims that it had been on the point of renewing its own attacks on Israel. The group warned that Israel had condemned the remaining hostages in Gaza to an “unknown fate.”

The Israeli government said that the resumption of airstrikes was intended to expedite the hostages’ release by putting Hamas under more pressure to compromise. The government’s domestic critics said the strikes actually endangered the hostages since they foreclosed any immediate chance of their negotiated release.

Critics said that the return to war was mainly an attempt to shore up Mr. Netanyahu’s fragile coalition ahead of a tight vote in Parliament on a new national budget. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right lawmaker who quit the government in January in protest of the cease-fire deal, led his party back into the coalition on Tuesday, praising the military action as “the right, moral, ethical and most justified step.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents also said that the renewed fighting was an attempt to distract from the government’s divisive plan to fire Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet.

“Netanyahu is using the lives of our citizens and soldiers because he trembles in fear of us — from the public protest against the dismissal of the head of the Shin Bet,” Yair Golan, an opposition leader, said in a social media post. The cabinet was expected to vote on Tuesday on Mr. Bar’s future, a move that had prompted calls for mass protests.

Asked to respond the opposition’s claims, Mr. Netanyahu’s office declined to comment.

Reporting was contributed by Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel, Myra Noveck from Jerusalem and Johnatan Reiss from Tel Aviv.