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The Israeli military has killed at least 18 Palestinians in attacks across Gaza after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered “powerful” strikes following an exchange of gunfire in southern Rafah, during which one Israeli soldier was wounded.
The attacks on Tuesday marked the most significant flare up in violence since a ceasefire brokered by United States President Donald Trump came into effect in the war-devastated territory on October 10.
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Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, accused Israel of violating the truce and said it would postpone the planned handover of the body of a missing captive.
In a statement, it also warned 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 remaining 13 captives in Gaza.
In Washington DC, US Vice President JD Vance insisted the truce was still holding despite the attacks and the claims of violations by both sides.
“That doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be little skirmishes here and there,” Vance told reporters on Capitol Hill.
“We know that Hamas or somebody else within Gaza attacked an [Israeli] soldier. We expect the Israelis are going to respond, but I think the president’s peace is going to hold despite that.”
Hamas, for its part, has denied any involvement in the attack in Rafah.
‘Mayem, panic’
In Gaza, medical sources told Al Jazeera that the victims of Tuesday’s attacks included four who were killed in a strike on a residential building in the Sabra neighbourhood of northern Gaza City and five others in southern Khan Younis.
The sources said at least 50 others were wounded.
Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City, said a missile had fallen behind the al-Shifa Hospital and that there had been “major activity in the air over Gaza’s skies, with drones hovering above”.
“Eyewitnesses 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.”
In the Sabra neighbourhood, efforts to rescue Palestinians trapped in the rubble continued through the night, with workers using their bare hands to dig through the debris.
Medics said those wounded included women and children.
“This is a breach of the ceasefire,” Ibrahim Abu Reesh, a civil defence worker, said from the site. “We have casualties. Our crews are searching this building to try and locate and rescue as many people as possible.”
The attacks came after Netanyahu’s office issued a statement saying the prime ministers has ordered the military to “carry out powerful strikes” in the Gaza Strip.
The statement did not give a specific reason for the attacks, but it was followed by a statement from Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, which blamed Hamas for the attack in Rafah. Katz pledged the group would “pay a heavy price” for the alleged attacks on Israeli soldiers.
The Associated Press news agency, citing two unnamed US officials, said Israel had notified Washington before launching the latest strikes on Gaza.
The Government Media Office in Gaza said Israel has killed at least 94 Palestinians in attacks since the ceasefire came into effect, and is continuing to heavily restrict the flow of aid to those who desperately need it.
‘Flagrant violation’
Hamas called for an end to the Israeli attacks.
The continued Israeli bombing in Gaza “represents a flagrant violation of the ceasefire agreement signed in Sharm el-Sheikh under the auspices of US President Trump”, it said on Telegram.
The group also said it remained committed to the deal.
“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’s 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.
The Qassam Brigades, after announcing the delay in the planned handover on Tuesday, also said it had recovered the bodies of two more dead Israeli captives, Amiram Cooper and Sahar Baruch, during search operations conducted on the day.
The development came after Netanyahu said remains handed over by Hamas on Monday were not from the 13 dead captives yet to be returned. Instead, he said they were those of a captive whose body had already been retrieved by Israeli forces nearly two years ago.
Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet had 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.
A US official meanwhile told Al Jazeera that locating the bodies of Israeli captives was “difficult, challenging, and time-consuming” amid the devastation Israel has wrought in Gaza.
The official said that 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.
Ceasefire hangs in the balance
Analysts say Netanyahu has been carrying out provocative acts since the beginning of the current truce in an effort to strain the agreement.
“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 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 Qatar, said Netanyahu finds his hands tied as the US has said it will not Israel 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,” she said.
“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.
