Hundreds are killed, Gazan officials say, shattering a period of relative calm. (2025)

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Here are the latest developments.

The attacks followed weeks of fruitless negotiations aimed at extending the fragile cease-fire, which paused 15 months of devastating fighting in the territory. Israel and Hamas were supposed to be holding talks on the truce’s second phase — which would end the war and free more hostages — but had seen little progress.

“From now on, negotiations will only be led under fire,” Mr. Netanyahu said in his address, suggesting that talks could potentially continue but Israeli attacks on Hamas would not stop.

Hamas accused Israel of deciding to “overturn the cease-fire agreement” and exposing the hostages taken from Israel and being held in Gaza “to an unknown fate.” Hamas, however, did not immediately respond militarily to the attacks.

In Gaza, the intensity of the bombardment recalled the war’s earliest days, when Israel launched a relentless wave of airstrikes in response to the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack that ignited the fighting.

“All of Gaza shook,” said Ramez Souri, a resident of Gaza City, in the north, who awoke to the sound of explosions, followed by the rush of ambulances.

The next phase of the cease-fire was supposed to free more hostages taken during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Mediators had hoped the talks would lead to an end to the conflict.

But Israeli leaders said they were unwilling to stop the fighting until the end of Hamas’s rule in the territory. Hamas has said it could compromise on civilian control but showed little inclination to disband its battalions of armed fighters or send leaders into exile.

Daniel B. Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, said on Tuesday: “Hamas’s insistence on holding on to hostages as leverage, and Netanyahu’s politically driven refusal to proceed with phase two of the cease-fire, which called for an end to the war and the release of all living hostages, led to this escalation.”

“Hurting Hamas militarily and releasing our hostages are not contradictory objectives, they are intertwined,” Mr. Netanyahu said in his address, pushing back on criticism from some families of hostages and the Israeli public that his political calculations have endangered the captives and arguing that military action has previously helped lead to the release of hostages.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said Israel had consulted the White House before launching the strikes.

Here’s what else to know:

• Militants killed: Hamas confirmed the deaths of five senior officials. Two, like Yasser Harb, were in the group’s political bureau. Others, including Bahjat Abu Sultan — director of Hamas’s feared internal security agency — held senior security roles. Another militant group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, also said the spokesman for its military wing, who was known as Abu Hamza, had been killed in the Israeli strikes.

• Fate of hostages: Fewer than half of the 59 hostages remaining in Gaza are thought to be alive, according to the Israeli government. The renewed fighting left the hostages who had returned to Israel during the recent cease-fire in anguish, and they said they feared for those left behind.

• Evacuation orders: The Israeli military ordered Palestinians living in parts of Gaza close to the border with Israel to leave their homes, labeling the areas “dangerous combat zones.”

• Aid halted: This month, Israel stopped allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza, another effort to pressure Hamas at the negotiating table.

Raja Abdulrahim and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

U.N. Security Council convenes an emergency session on the Israeli strikes.

“Once again, the people of Gaza are living in abject fear,” Mr. Fletcher said. “Modest gains made during the cease-fire are being destroyed. We cannot accept a return to pre-cease-fire conditions or the complete denial of the entry of humanitarian relief. Civilians must be protected, and their essential needs must be met.”

The strikes came after Israel blocked all humanitarian aid from entering Gaza from March 3 for the approximately two million Palestinians living there. Mr. Fletcher said food, medicine, fuel and cooking gas had not been allowed into the territory since then, and appeals for Israel to allow U.N. convoys to enter had been “systematically rejected.”

Israel said it had resumed attacks on Hamas targets because the group had refused to release the remaining hostages still held in Gaza. Israel’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Jonathan Miller, told the Council that the reports of a humanitarian aid crisis in Gaza were “highly exaggerated.” And he said the Council should ask Hamas why it was still holding hostages in horrific conditions.

“If this Council wishes to address suffering,” Mr. Miller said, “then it must demand the immediate and unconditional release of the hostages. There can be no progress until this occurs.”

Algeria, the only current Arab member of the Council, had initially requested the emergency meeting on behalf of a group of Arab countries to discuss the humanitarian aid blockade, but Israel’s airstrikes dominated the discussion.

Algeria’s U.N. ambassador, Amar Bendjama, said that Israel was inflicting “collective punishment” on Palestinians and that the Council meeting was “a plea for justice against an Israeli occupying authority that has weaponized starvation as a tool of war.”

The Security Council adopted a resolution in June 2024 calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and the release of all hostages held by Hamas after months of impasse and four vetoes by the United States against attempts to end the war.

Council resolutions are legally binding and considered international law. The Council does not have a means to enforce its resolutions but can punish violations with measures such as sanctions.

Dorothy Shea, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, defended Israel and said Hamas was solely responsible for the resumption of hostilities. “President Trump has made clear that Hamas must release the hostages immediately or pay a high price, and we support Israel in its next steps,” Ms. Shea said.

UNICEF said that Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza had killed 130 children, in the largest single-day child death toll in the war for the past year. The airstrikes hit shelters where children were sleeping with their families, UNICEF’s executive director, Catherine Russell, said in a statement.

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian U.N. representative, made an emotional plea to the Council, urging it to act.

“The same images are back to haunt us,” Mr. Mansour said. “Small children on gurneys, little siblings injured and disoriented trying to comfort and reassure each other, entire families killed, children, mothers, fathers, searching for their loved ones under the rubble, not knowing if they are dead or alive.”

Israeli strikes are fueled by Hamas’s use of the hostages as leverage and Netanyahu’s political priorities, analysts say.

The renewed Israeli strikes in Gaza also killed a number of Hamas military and governance officials.

Hamas led the deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that ignited the war and Israel’s devastating bombardment of the enclave. Both sides agreed to a cease-fire in mid-January, and the new strikes came while negotiations to proceed to the second phase of the fragile truce had stalled.

“Hamas’s insistence on holding onto hostages as leverage, and Netanyahu’s politically driven refusal to proceed with phase two of the cease-fire, which called for an end to the war and the release of all living hostages, led to this escalation,” said Daniel B. Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel.

Dana Stroul, the Pentagon’s former top Middle East policy official, said, “Israel’s takeaway from its campaign after October 7 until the recent cease-fire is that military pressure works.”

“Hamas wants to proceed to the second phase of the cease-fire because it sees that as the way to end the war and get long-term relief from military pressure,” added Ms. Stroul, who is now research director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “This is exactly why Israel does not want to proceed to the second phase — Hamas is still an intact organization, even though it is currently diminished.”

To increase the pressure on Hamas, Israel halted all humanitarian aid deliveries and cut off electricity provision to Gaza to pressure Hamas, and Israel has the backing of the Trump administration for those moves, she said.

“This is more than military pressure, and the unknown is how long Hamas will be able to withstand it,” Ms. Stroul said.

The attacks came at the same time that the U.S. military has started a new aggressive military campaign against the Houthi militants in Yemen. That group, like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, is supported by Iran. But Tehran is backing away from all its proxies as it considers President Trump’s offer to negotiate their nuclear program in the face of severe economic pressure.

In a statement on social media, Hezbollah condemned Israel’s new campaign in Gaza, but made no threats or pledge to take military action against Israel in response. Hezbollah began firing rockets and drones at Israel in solidarity with Hamas after the attacks in 2023 that eventually escalated into the full-blown war before the U.S.-brokered cease-fire last year.

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.

Following up, the Israeli military said shortly after the sirens sounded that the Air Force had intercepted a projectile from Yemen before it crossed into Israeli territory.

Tuesday was one of the war’s deadlier days, Gaza officials say.

After Hamas’s assault on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed 1,200 in Israel and saw 250 taken hostage, Israel launched a bombing campaign with few parallels in recent years, killing thousands in the first weeks of the war.

As Israel’s ground invasion wore on, the official daily death tolls, which initially were often in the hundreds, dropped precipitously. Israel also came under international pressure to reduce the killing of civilians in deadly airstrikes, including from the Biden administration.

More than 48,000 Gazans have been killed since the beginning of the war, according to the Gazan health ministry. The death toll and the question of how many of those killed were combatants have been the subject of intense debate throughout the fighting. In January, Israel’s outgoing chief of staff said the military had “eliminated” nearly 20,000 Hamas operatives.

For some Gazans, the intensity of the attack on Tuesday recalled the earliest and bloodiest days of the Israeli aerial campaign. The Israeli military said it was striking sites and individuals affiliated with Hamas and another militant group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, across the enclave.

The unusually high fatalities were in part because many people who had returned to their devastated neighborhoods during the cease-fire were sheltering together in the few homes that remained standing, said Mahmoud Basal, a spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defense emergency service.

“There are entire families that were buried under the rubble,” Mr. Basal said.

Suzanne Abu Daqqa, who lives in Abasan, a southern suburb of the city of Khan Younis, described a sudden wave of crashing explosions in the middle of the night.

She rushed to check the news, as did her family, she said. “Then we saw it wasn’t just in our neighborhood — it was all over Gaza,” Ms. Abu Daqqa said.

Some of the bombs hit Abasan, she said. On Tuesday morning, the Israeli military called on residents of the area to evacuate, calling it a “dangerous combat zone.”

Zaher al-Waheidi, a lead statistician at the Gaza health ministry, shared a breakdown of how many bodies had reached different hospitals in the enclave. The figures were preliminary and could not be verified, but gave an indication of where the Israeli strikes may have been the fiercest.

More than 150 arrived at two major hospitals in Gaza City, while roughly the same number reached two hospitals in and near the southern city of Khan Younis. Only a few — around 30 bodies — arrived at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central Gaza Strip, according to the health ministry figures.

The rest were brought to smaller medical centers scattered across the enclave, according to the ministry.

Lauren Leatherby and Hiba Yazbek contributed reporting.

The military spokesman’s statement also said that Israel was striking in Gaza because Hamas refused to release remaining hostages. That is the justification that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, gave for striking on Tuesday, saying that Hamas’s repeated refusals and intractability at the negotiation table prompted Israel’s attacks.

Hamas does not respond militarily to renewed Israeli attack.

But throughout the day, there was a notable absence of rocket fire by Palestinian militants or attempts to ambush Israeli soldiers.

Suhail al-Hindi, a Hamas official, reacted to the assault by saying the group hopes to restore the cease-fire but reserves the right to respond.

“How to respond is left to those on the ground,” he said in a telephone interview. “They know and understand how to respond to the occupation.”

There is no question that Israel's 15-month war against Hamas weakened the group that has long ruled Gaza. Israel killed thousands of its fighters and destroyed much of its tunnel network which was used, among other things, to store weaponry. And it undermined Hamas’s ability to fire rockets at Israel.

Mr. al-Hindi acknowledged that the capabilities of Palestinian militant groups in Gaza were degraded by the war, but he said they still had both the ability and the desire to fight.

“The issue isn’t one of equipment and weapons,” he said. “It’s about will, and I believe there’s lots of will to resist this occupation.”

Hamas has worked to regroup over the last two months since a cease-fire agreement with Israel came into effect. It has been collecting unexploded bombs throughout Gaza and repurposing them as improvised explosive devices, according to one member of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing. It has also been recruiting new members and replacing commanders who were killed, the member said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details.

Seven members of the Israeli parliament’s foreign affairs and defense committee said in a letter that they recently learned that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group in Gaza, have more than 25,000 and 5,000 fighters, respectively, still in the territory.

“The Qassam Brigades is still able to confront the Israeli occupation,” said Ibrahim Madhoun, a Palestinian analyst from Gaza who is close to Hamas.

The lack of any military response to the new Israeli onslaught could mean the group was focused on preparing for a fight in case of an Israeli ground invasion, he said.

The Israeli military has said it was attacking Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller militant group in Gaza, targeting groups of fighters, missile launch posts and weapons stockpiles. Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said Israel conducted “pre-emptive” strikes on Hamas after receiving indications that the group was planning attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers.

In contrast, a statement from the Israeli prime minister’s office about the Gaza bombings emphasized Hamas’s refusal to accept proposals from President Trump’s Middle East envoy to extend the cease-fire, without referring to Hamas planning any attacks.

Hamas denied it was planning to attack Israeli troops, saying the Israeli claims were “baseless and false pretexts to justify its return to the war.”

The Israeli bombardment followed weeks of unsuccessful negotiations to extend the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.

Despite the intensity of Israel’s attacks, Mr. Madhoun said Hamas wouldn’t relent to Israeli demands to end its role in Gaza or hand over large numbers of the remaining hostages without guarantees of a permanent end to the war.

“Hamas doesn’t want an escalation, but it will not surrender,” he said.

Israel has been trying to pressure Hamas to release living hostages in exchange for an extension of the cease-fire, without giving the group the reassurances it seeks that the war will end permanently.

Israel has vowed throughout the war that it will not allow Hamas to continue to govern Gaza and will ensure that it can never again mount another attack like the one on Oct. 7, 2023, that set off the war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that for the war to end, Hamas’s government and military wing must be dismantled, a position shared by his right-wing coalition partners in the government.

While Hamas has suggested it was willing to give up civilian governance of Gaza, it has firmly rejected dissolving its military wing, a critical source of its power in the enclave.

During the initial phase of the cease-fire, the group tried to use handovers of hostages to show it was still a powerful forces in Gaza. Nearly every time it transferred Israeli captives to the Red Cross, it put on theatrical ceremonies featuring hundreds of mask-wearing and gun-toting militants.

Michael Milstein, a former Israeli military intelligence officer specializing in Palestinian affairs, said Hamas may be trying to first gauge whether Israel was planning a long-term assault or a limited salvo before it responds.

“They want to know where things are going,” Mr. Milstein said. “If everything is going to end in two hours, they don’t want to waste what remains of their ammunition. But if it goes on for a long time, they will respond.”

Iyad Abuheweila and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.

“To some degree, President Trump’s bellicose rhetoric and unserious Gaza Riviera proposal have boxed the Israeli leadership in by outflanking them from the right,” Shapiro said. “They can’t be less Trump than Trump. There is no Arab state support for moving 2 million Palestinians out of Gaza, and there will be even less now. But unless Hamas is removed from power, this war will not end.”

The strikes came as talks to end the war in Gaza had run into trouble.

Those six weeks ended earlier this month. By then, mediators had hoped to broker the next phase of the agreement, which entailed a formal end to the war, the release of the remaining living hostages and the full withdrawal of Israeli troops.

But Israeli leaders, particularly Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, said they couldn’t countenance that as long as Hamas remained in control of Gaza. Hamas has shown little interest in dismantling the armed battalions it deployed in the October 2023 surprise attack that ignited the war, or in sending its Gaza leaders into exile.

To avoid announcing an end to the war, Israel began demanding the immediate release of more hostages in exchange for extending the truce. Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s Middle East envoy, offered similar proposals to Hamas through Qatari and Egyptian mediators.

On March 3, Israel blocked the delivery of food and other desperately needed humanitarian aid into Gaza in an attempt to further pressure Hamas to come to more favorable terms. Aid groups quickly warned that the decision would have serious consequences for Gazan civilians, who were already coming off a year of hunger and desperation.

For another two weeks, the increasingly fraught cease-fire mostly held, occasionally punctuated by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. Israel said it targeted militants laying explosive devices or flying drones; Hamas claimed more than 150 were killed, including civilians.

With the Israel-Hamas talks at an impasse, the Trump administration sent another envoy, Adam Boehler, to talk directly with the Palestinian armed group about securing the freedom of Edan Alexander, the last surviving American Israeli hostage, and the release of the bodies of four others.

Last week, Hamas officials said they were willing to free Mr. Alexander and turn over the bodies. But the White House said Hamas was demanding too much for too little. Mr. Witkoff’s office said his proposal would involve the release of multiple living hostages in exchange for an extension of the first phase of the cease-fire, much as Israel had hoped.

“Hamas is making a very bad bet that time is on its side. It is not. Hamas is well aware of the deadline, and should know that we will respond accordingly if that deadline passes,” Mr. Witkoff’s office said in a statement, without specifying when that might be.

On Tuesday morning, Israel launched its attack. Gideon Saar, the Israeli foreign minister, said Israel had decided to go ahead with it because of a “dead end” in the talks with Hamas to release more hostages.

Mr. Saar suggested that Israel would be willing to return to the negotiating table if Hamas made major concessions in the negotiations over Gaza’s future.

“If we could achieve the same goals in a different way, fine,” he said. “But if it’s impossible to advance that way, you resume military operations.”

Hamas officials vowed that would not happen. “War and destruction will not bring the enemy what they failed to get through negotiations,” Izzat al-Rishq, a Hamas official, said in a statement.

Israel has ‘abandoned the hostages’ by resuming attacks, families say.

“The greatest fear of the families, the hostages and the citizens has come true,” the group said in a statement, hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office ordered the first major strikes in Gaza since a cease-fire with Hamas began in January. The health ministry in Gaza, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its statistics, said that around 400 people had been killed.

Hours later, thousands of angry Israelis poured into the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to protest the breakdown of the truce. In Jerusalem, demonstrators carried signs with photos of hostages still held in Gaza, chanting, “Military force kills the hostages.”

“We have seen what happened during the past year. Many hostages died in captivity,” said Richard Sihel, a 32-year-old activist from Jerusalem.

Some protesters said the timing of the decision to strike Gaza suggested it was politically motivated, aimed at diverting attention from Mr. Netanyahu’s firing of Israel’s chief of domestic intelligence. Many feared the dismissal would undermine the agency’s independence and strengthen Netanyahu’s grip on power. Other protesters argued that reigniting the war — even on a limited scale — could help Netanyahu expand his coalition ahead of a critical budget vote this month.

“The recent attack in Gaza is driven by the government’s domestic political interests,” said Achinoam Eytan, a 31-year-old nurse from Jerusalem, who said this was her first protest in decades. Mr. Netanyahu has denied that his decision was politically motivated.

Israeli hostages who were freed under the January cease-fire agreement joined the criticism of the government’s airstrikes and expressed fear for those left behind in Gaza.

“My heart is broken, shattered and disappointed,” Emily Damari, a freed hostage, wrote on social media. She vowed to fight to bring home two of her close friends who were still captives.

Tens of thousands of Israelis have marched in solidarity with the hostage families. In the first phase of the cease-fire that begin in January, Hamas released 25 hostages and the bodies of eight others, in ceremonies that were widely viewed in live broadcasts around Israel. But Hamas and Israel have failed to come to terms on an extension of the cease-fire.

Around 250 people in Israel were seized during the attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, that started the war. Since then, a total of more than 130 hostages have been released, including more than 100 during an initial cease-fire in the early months of the war. The hostages were exchanged for hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

The Israeli military has also retrieved the bodies of at least 40 others. Fewer than half of the 59 who remain in Gaza are alive, according to the Israeli government.

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.

Hundreds are killed, Gazan officials say, shattering a period of relative calm.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said that more than 400 people had been killed. The ministry’s count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Hamas publicly announced the deaths of at least six senior officials, including members of its Gaza leadership.

When Israel launched the strikes around 2 a.m., some people were preparing a special meal before the daily Ramadan fast, while others were jolted out of their sleep.

“At the same moment, there were violent explosions everywhere,” said Yahya Masri, 29, a resident of Gaza City. “Everyone was asking, ‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’”

Mr. Masri said Israel had carried out some airstrikes in recent days, but the intensity of the assault on Tuesday morning reminded him of the worst moments of the war.

Rosalia Bollen, a spokeswoman for UNICEF who is working in southern Gaza, said she was awakened at around 2:10 a.m. by “very, very loud explosions.” She said the entire guesthouse where she was staying “was shaking violently.”

Ms. Bollen described an intense 15 minutes of consecutive airstrikes, followed by sporadic bombardment for the rest of the night. “Every five or six seconds there were very loud explosions, just uninterrupted,” said Ms. Bollen. “After it subsided, I could hear people yelling outside.”

“Ambulances have been driving back and forth all night,” said Ms. Bollen, who emphasized that Gaza’s hospitals were collapsing and unable to accommodate the new wave of wounded people. “They don’t have antibiotics, syringes, or gauze,” she said.

Mahmoud Basal, spokesman in Gaza for the Palestinian Civil Defense, a rescue and emergency service under the Hamas-run Interior Ministry, said the aftermath of the bombardment was “catastrophic.”

“We are facing a very harsh reality where the massive efforts by medical teams and rescue crews do not rise to the scale of the existing disaster,” he said in a voice message on Tuesday.

Mr. Basal said that the high numbers of dead and injured were partly because houses were full of people who had returned to their neighborhoods during the cease-fire and were sheltering together in the few homes that remained standing. “Each house had at least 20 people inside,” he said, adding: “There are entire families that were buried under the rubble.”

For weeks, Israel and Hamas have failed to move from the first stage of the cease-fire agreement signed in January to the second stage, which calls for the end of the war and a complete Israeli withdrawal.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that for the war to end, Hamas’s government and military wing must be dismantled, a position shared by his right-wing coalition partners in the government. Hamas has suggested it was willing to give up civilian governance of Gaza, but has firmly rejected dissolving its military wing, a critical source of its power in the enclave.

That disagreement has made Palestinians in Gaza concerned that any cease-fire would only be temporary.

“We were hopeful about the cease-fire, but now we’re worried we’ll be stuck in this situation with no end,” Mr. Fares said. “We have a bad feeling.”

Akram al-Satri, a 47-year-old translator from Khan Younis, said he had heard explosions in the night followed by “the screams of people and the sirens of ambulances.”

Mr. al-Satri said an entire family had been killed in his neighborhood of Khan Younis . “Fear is coming back full-fledged to the Gaza Strip,” he said.

Another of the Hamas officials killed was Bahjat Abu Sultan, a leader of Hamas’s internal security body. The agency is a feared branch of Hamas’s rule in Gaza: It hunts down and interrogates Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel, as well as activists who agitate against Hamas control. Before the war, its agents also monitored Gaza’s border crossings and guarded senior Hamas leaders.

As talks with Hamas stall, Israel puts war back on the table.

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 and, though it did call on Palestinians to step up attacks in the West Bank, it did not issue a statement vowing 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.

The strikes raise concerns about the hostages, fewer than half of whom are thought to be alive.

In January, Israel and Hamas agreed to a multi-stage truce that would allow for the exchange of Hamas-captured hostages in Gaza in exchange for Palestinian prisoners jailed by Israel.

The first phase of the cease-fire ended in early March. Hamas released 30 Israeli and foreign hostages and handed over eight bodies, in exchange for the Israeli release of over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Several hostages had already been rescued or released before the two sides reached the agreement.

The fate of the cease-fire was unclear, though, after Israel resumed heavy strikes into Gaza on Tuesday, citing Hamas’s repeated refusal to release the remaining hostages. Earlier this month, President Trump sent warnings to Hamas militants to immediately release the remaining hostages in Gaza or face death.

Hamas accused Israel early Tuesday of overturning the cease-fire, “exposing the prisoners in Gaza to an unknown fate.”