Israel orders new Gaza strikes after claiming Hamas breach over captives

The Israeli military has struck multiple sites in Gaza City after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the military to carry out intense strikes on the war-devastated Gaza Strip, claiming that Hamas violated the United States-brokered ceasefire.

“Following security consultations, Prime Minister Netanyahu instructed the military to immediately carry out powerful strikes in the Gaza Strip,” a statement from his office said.

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Reporting from Gaza City, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said one missile fell behind the al-Shifa Hospital and that there had been “major activity in the air over Gaza’s skies, with drones hovering above”.

“Eyewitness described the strike as massive. We are in an area about 20 minutes away, and we could hear it from here,” he said. “The attack caused a state of mayhem and panic among patients and medical staff inside the hospital.”

Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz claimed on Tuesday that Hamas targeted its troops, vowing the group would “pay a heavy price” for alleged attacks on soldiers and for “violating the agreement to return the bodies of the hostages”.

Earlier, Netanyahu had said Hamas had committed a “clear violation” of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza by returning remains belonging to a previously recovered captive.

“Israel must realise that we are committed to the agreement, and they must stop falsely accusing us of violating it,” said Suhail al-Hindi, a member of Hamas’ political bureau in Gaza. He told Al Jazeera the group faced “significant difficulties” during the recovery of the bodies of the Israeli captives.

“We have made every effort possible to recover the bodies, and the occupation bears full responsibility for any delay in recovering the remaining bodies,” he said.

A US official told Al Jazeera the ceasefire was still holding. “The ceasefire agreement is still holding in Gaza, and we continue to work to implement President Trump’s peace plan,” said the US official on condition of anonymity.

“Transition to permanent peace in Gaza is a difficult task after two years of conflict in the Strip,” said the official.

Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and several key Arab and Muslim nations, who added their considerable diplomatic weight to the deal, have accused Israel of multiple violations of the agreement over the last nearly three weeks. Dozens have been killed in Gaza and Israel is continuing to heavily restrict the flow of aid to those who desperately need it.

Hamas’s military wing announced that it now will postpone the handover of the Israeli captive’s body that it found earlier today “due to violations” by Israel.

In a statement, Qassam Brigades stressed that any Israeli escalation “will hinder search, digging, and retrieval operations of the bodies, which will lead to a delay in recovering the bodies” of the dead captives.

The latest developments have threatened an already-straining ceasefire agreement and sparked fears of a return to war on Gaza’s bombarded and besieged population.

There were reports of gunfire in Rafah in southern Gaza near the border with Egypt later on Tuesday. It is thought that there was an exchange of fire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters from the Gaza Strip.

Then, artillery shelling started, and explosions were heard in Rafah and the eastern part of Khan Younis city. There are also reports that one Israeli soldier was injured.

The latest remains handed over by Hamas earlier were not from the 13 dead captives yet to be returned, according to Netanyahu. Instead, he said they were those of a captive whose body had already been retrieved by Israeli forces nearly two years ago.

The anonymous US official told Al Jazeera that locating the bodies of Israeli captives was “difficult, challenging, and time-consuming”. The Civil-Military Co-operation Centre, a US-led body set up to facilitate reconstruction and aid delivery, had played a vital role in bringing Egyptian technical teams into Gaza to retrieve the bodies, said the official.

Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet has called for harsh measures in response, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich urging the re-arrest of Palestinians released in exchanges “in response to Hamas’s repeated and ongoing violations”.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said the correct response was to “destroy [Hamas] completely”.

Other options include halting the already severely limited flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza, expanding Israeli control of the enclave, or ordering air strikes targeting Hamas leaders, according to Israeli media.

Ceasefire hangs in the balance

Since the beginning of the current truce between Israel and Hamas, Netanyahu has been carrying out provocative acts meant to strain the agreement, an analyst says.

“Netanyahu, from the very start of the ceasefire, has been trying to find any trick possible to resume the genocide in Gaza,” Muhammad Shehada, an analyst with the European Council on Foreign Relations based in Copenhagen, told Al Jazeera.

“We see this with Israel refusing to open up the Rafah border crossing, with restricting, until this moment, the amount of aid going in … continuing these bombardments here and there despite the ceasefire being in place under bogus and unsubstantiated claims.”

Shehada said Israel’s leadership is testing the waters to see how far it can go in breaking the ceasefire with Hamas that was orchestrated by US President Donald Trump.

“We see the same thing again and again and again. It’s basically Netanyahu testing the boundaries with Trump and trying to build up a case for resuming the genocide in Gaza,” he added.

But Israeli political analyst Ori Goldberg told Al Jazeera earlier that he thought the dispute was unlikely to derail the entire ceasefire agreement, with the US and its regional partners so heavily invested in the deal to end the two-year war.

“This whole notion that the future, the present of the ceasefire, the assistance millions need so urgently, the chance to end a two-year genocidal campaign — that all of this will simply be thrown out because of a ‘violation’ is ridiculous,” Goldberg said.

Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim, reporting from Doha, Qatar said, “The Israeli prime minister’s hands are tied since the US said it will not allow it to continue its war on Gaza. We know that Americans have more say on what happens and what does not happen in Gaza through the “civil coordination centre” in southern Israel.”

“Now it feels like the Israelis are trying to find these clashes here and there to justify what they always wanted to do – a ceasefire on their own terms in which they can attack who they want and control which borders are open or not,” she added.