A Palestinian woman cries as she sits atop the rubble of her home, destroyed by an Israeli strike, in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza on Tuesday. (Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images)
JERUSALEM — Israel pummeled the Gaza Strip with airstrikes Tuesday, killing more than 400 people, injuring hundreds more and shattering a two-month-old ceasefire that, for a time, brought both a measure of calm to the war-battered enclave and the release of nearly three dozen Israeli hostages held captive by Hamas and other Palestinian militants.
The Israeli military and Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, said in a statement early Tuesday that they were conducting “extensive strikes” on purported Hamas targets in Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Israel Defense Forces to “take strong action” against the militants, according to a statement from his office, accusing Hamas of rejecting multiple proposals from mediators to release the remaining hostages.
Those proposals aimed to extend the first phase of the ceasefire, which expired March 1. Israel and Hamas agreed to a three-stage truce in January and were supposed to begin hashing out the second phase of the agreement — including a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza — last month.
But Israel dragged its feet, delaying substantive talks, as Netanyahu sought to keep his shaky governing coalition, which includes right-wing hawks keen on continuing the war, from falling apart.
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“From now on, Israel will act against Hamas with increasing intensity. Negotiations will take place only under fire,” Netanyahu said Tuesday night in a televised address.
“This is just the beginning,” he added. “Military pressure is a necessary condition for the release of the hostages.”
For the roughly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza, the strikes brought a sudden return to the carnage, terror and displacement that shaped their lives in the 15 months leading up to the ceasefire.
The last two months of relative calm allowed many displaced people to return home and take stock of the damage. As humanitarian relief flowed into Gaza, they reunited with relatives and neighbors, buried their dead and started the process of trying to heal.
A little more than two weeks ago, however, Israel said it was blocking all food, aid and other supplies from entering the enclave. The move sent prices of basic goods soaring, and aid agencies condemned Israel for what they said was an act of collective punishment.
Then, on Tuesday, the bombardment began shortly after 2 a.m. local time, before the predawn Ramadan meal of suhoor, when families gather to eat before resuming their daily fasts.
Salma Kaddoumi, 35, a citizen journalist living in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, said she was preparing suhoor when suddenly “we heard a huge explosion and our house shook.” At first, she thought a gas cylinder had exploded — but then the booms sounded again and again, from all directions.
Momentary quiet descended only when the Israeli military issued evacuation orders for neighborhoods along the enclave’s perimeter, she said, sparking fear among Gazans of yet another ground invasion and leaving many wondering where they could safely go.
The ongoing air and artillery assault killed 404 people and injured nearly 600, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The daily toll was one of the war’s highest, and the United Nations Children’s Fund said in a statement that more than 130 children had been killed, “representing one of the largest single-day child death tolls in the last year.”
Before Tuesday’s strikes, the Gaza Health Ministry reported that more than 48,577 people in Gaza had been killed and 112,041 people injured since the war began Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas and allied fighters from Gaza streamed into southern Israel and killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 people hostage.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that Israel consulted the U.S. administration about the strikes. “As President Trump has made it clear, Hamas, the Houthis, Iran, all those who seek to terrorize not just Israel, but also the United States of America, will see a price to pay,” Leavitt said.
Israel informed the United States ahead of the attack and U.S. officials “supported it — because justice is on our side,” said Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, who was speaking to leaders from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee during a meeting in Jerusalem on Tuesday.
The strikes across Gaza sent injured men, women and children streaming into nearby hospitals, where rows of the dead, wrapped in bloodied shrouds, soon covered the floors, according to photos, witness testimonies and videos verified by The Washington Post.
Only 13 out of 38 hospitals across Gaza remain in service, the Health Ministry said. Feroze Sidhwa, an American surgeon working at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, said his hospital had been inundated with civilian wounded. “Mostly children,” he said. “Some women, a smattering of men.”
He had worked in the operating room all night, and said he lost count of the surgeries he completed. There was a toddler with shrapnel in her brain and spleen and a 6-year-old boy whose heart briefly stopped after suffering grievous wounds to his belly. One of the most badly injured patients, a 29-year-old woman, was the sister of a nurse at the hospital, Sidhwa said. As the sun rose, a crowd grew outside the hospital morgue.
Ramy Abdu, head of the newly established Palestinian Center for Missing and Forcibly Disappeared Persons, said an early morning strike killed eight members of his family, among them four children — including his niece, Suwar. In a recent photo Abdu shared on X, the little girl, wearing pink tennis shoes and a red sweater, sits with a slight smile in the ruins of her destroyed home.
“They believed the ceasefire was in place and that they, as civilians, were safe from any targeting,” he said. “What we are witnessing is a deliberate massacre of civilians in their homes — the work of gangs rather than regular armies.”
The casualty count was so high because Israel struck dozens of residential buildings, many of which were sheltering extended families, in the middle of the night, said Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for Gaza’s Civil Defense.
High-ranking members of the Hamas-run government, including acting prime minister Essam Al-Da’alis and senior officials in the justice ministry, interior ministry and internal security service, were killed in the bombings, Hamas said in a statement. The Israeli military and Shin Bet alleged they “oversaw the integration of all of Hamas’ branches in Gaza and their use for terrorist purposes.”
Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an allied group, said the spokesman for its military wing, known by the nom de guerre Abu Hamza, was also killed.
Hamas condemned Israel for breaking the ceasefire and warned that it could have consequences for the 59 Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza — 24 of whom were still believed to be alive before Tuesday strikes.
The overnight blitz followed weeks of stalemate, and two Israeli officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, told The Washington Post that the bombardment was largely a negotiating tactic to force Hamas to soften its stance.
Israeli leaders weighed options for renewed fighting in Gaza and applying military pressure on Hamas. Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials gathered in recent days and chose one of the options presented by the military that entailed heavy airstrikes on dozens of targets in Gaza, including mid- to high-level Hamas leaders who were regrouping forces — but not the organization’s most senior figures, an Israeli official said.
The other Israeli official described the military plans as “phased” and said the government was waiting to see whether the air campaign influences the negotiations before advancing to heavier attacks. “If the other side [Hamas] decides to go back to the table for genuine talks, then the IDF would stop,” the official said. “But at the moment, because all else failed, this is the opportunity.”
Later Tuesday, David Mencer, a spokesman for Netanyahu’s office, offered a conflicting rationale, telling reporters that the strikes were “preemptive” and launched after officials learned Hamas was preparing to attack Israel.
The bombing was condemned by relatives of Israeli hostages in Gaza, who fear that the resumption of hostilities will mean a death sentence for their loved ones in captivity.
“We are shocked, outraged, and terrified,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, an umbrella organization representing most of the families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, said in a statement, calling for a return to negotiations.
Egyptian and Qatari mediators were scrambling Tuesday to bring the parties back to the negotiating table, said a former Egyptian official briefed on the efforts, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
Condemnations of Israel’s attack poured in Tuesday from Arab countries, who warned that it risked reigniting a regional conflagration.
The Iran-backed Houthi movement in Yemen vowed to “continue military escalation in support of Gaza and the Palestinian people until the aggression stops and the siege is lifted,” referring to Israel’s blockade. On Tuesday, the group fired a missile at Israel, but the air force intercepted it before it reached Israeli territory, the IDF said.
But fear of retaliatory missile fire didn’t deter Israeli hostage families and their supporters from protesting a decision they see as having prioritized Netanyahu’s political survival over the wishes of a majority of Israelis who support moving to the second phase of the ceasefire.
Demonstrations were underway near Jerusalem and in Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, Einav Zangauker, mother of hostage Matan Zangauker, stood along the Gaza border, in Nir Oz, on Tuesday in an effort to “physically block the return to war,” she wrote in a Facebook post, calling on Israelis to join her.
Yarden Bibas, who was released during the first phase of the ceasefire and whose wife and two young sons were killed in captivity — and became symbols of the Israeli hostages’ plight — wrote on Facebook: “Israel’s decision to return to fighting brings me back to Gaza, to the moments where I heard the sounds of explosions around me and where I feared for my life as I was afraid that the tunnel where I was being held would collapse.”
He added: “The military pressure endangers the hostages while an agreement brings them home.”
Berger reported from Jaffa, Israel; Mahfouz from Cairo; Cheeseman from Beirut; and Shih from Jerusalem. Louisa Loveluck, Hajar Harb and Imogen Piper in London; Hazem Balousha in Toronto; Mohamad El Chamaa in Beirut; and Lior Soroka and Shira Rubin in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.