Mediators try to revive Israel-Hamas ceasefire as fighting resumes

Israel has launched new bombing attacks and warned Palestinians of imminent combat in parts of southern Gaza, as negotiators scramble to reinstate a truce.

Israel steps up military operations in Gaza after a sustained truce between Hamas and Israel did not hold further than a week. Picture: Getty

Negotiators scrambled to reinstate a week long truce between Israel and Hamas that expired Friday, as both sides resumed fighting a nearly two-month-old war that has left large parts of Gaza in ruins and more than 100 hostages still in captivity.

Israel launched new bombing attacks and warned Palestinians of imminent combat in parts of southern Gaza, endangering more than a million people, including hundreds of thousands who fled there after weeks of fighting in the northern part of the enclave. Israel said Hamas violated the ceasefire first, by refusing to hand over a complete list of hostages to be released and by firing rockets toward Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is aiming to step up pressure on Hamas with a revived military campaign intended to either force the U.S.-designated terrorist group to release more hostages or to continue until the militants are defeated.

But Israel is facing pressure from the families of hostages not to abandon the indirect talks with Hamas and from the U.S. to constrain the timeline and tactics of its military operation in Gaza.

Mediators from Egypt and Qatar were seeking a breakthrough Friday that would again halt the Israeli offensive, but the negotiations have stalled over which hostages would be released by Hamas next, Egyptian officials said.

Israel says it wants Hamas to release the remaining women and children it holds, the officials said. The militant group says it doesn’t hold many more women and children – a claim disputed by Israel – and has offered to release the bodies of dead hostages and elderly men, instead.

Hamas has given little indication it is prepared to release adult male hostages, Israeli soldiers and the handful of Americans in its custody.

Those categories of hostages are viewed as valuable by Hamas, which is seeking the large-scale release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody and wants to force Israel to curtail its military operation in return for their release — demands that Israel has so far rejected.

Eran Etzion, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel, said Hamas had managed to survive Israel’s initial assault and may believe it has a chance of surviving in the long term if the pressure builds on Israel to halt its renewed offensive in southern Gaza before the militant group is defeated.

A U.S. official said that Israel has promised in recent days to undertake a more targeted military operation that would limit civilian casualties as well as damage to buildings and other infrastructure.

In meetings this week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken also pressed Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet on how much longer the war would continue and received no clear answer, the U.S. official said. American officials say that international pressure could force Israel to stop its operation by early next year, especially if civilian casualties continue at high levels — a timeline that Israel hasn’t accepted.

“While the U.S. believes Israel has only weeks left, it’s going to be difficult for Israel to achieve its war goals within weeks,” Etzion said. “It’s a weakness that Hamas has surely identified.” After a week long ceasefire that led to the release of more than 100 hostages, Hamas didn’t produce a list Friday morning of another 10 people to be freed, prompting Israel to say Hamas had violated the terms of the truce.

Blinken also blamed the militant group for the resumption in fighting, saying it had “reneged on commitments it made” even before the fighting pause ended, fired rockets from Gaza Friday morning and carried out “an atrocious terrorist attack in Jerusalem,” referring to a shooting Thursday at a bus station that left three dead.

Hamas insisted to mediators that they didn’t have access to more women and children hostages that it could turn over to prolong the truce, a claim Israel didn’t believe, according to the U.S. official. Attempts to extend the pause collapsed in part because Hamas was facing difficulty obtaining access to four women hostages held by other groups in Gaza, Egyptian officials said.

Hamas said Friday that Israel refused an offer to release more captives and the bodies of members of an Israeli family killed in Israeli air strikes. It had previously said that Shiri Bibas, 32, and her children, four-year-old Ariel and 10-month-old Kfir, were killed in an Israeli air strike.

“We offered to hand over the bodies of the Bibas family, release their father so that he can participate in their burial, and hand over two Israeli detainees,” the group said in a statement, adding that Israel refused the offers.

Hamas also agreed to a proposal by Egypt and Qatar for a release of elderly men, according to Egyptian officials, which Israel didn’t accept.

Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on the Hamas account. U.S. citizen Judi Weinstein, 70, is one of the last remaining older female hostages in Hamas captivity, Israeli officials say. Weinstein and her husband Gad Haggai, 70, were kidnapped from their kibbutz on Oct. 7 while out on their morning walk and taken to Gaza, her daughter, Iris Weinstein Haggai, said. Based on a subsequent video of her father’s body, he is believed to be dead.

The number of hostages confirmed by Israeli authorities to have died continued to rise on Friday, as an Israeli kibbutz and a hostages forum reported the deaths of two men and a woman abducted in the attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7. Kibbutz Nir Oz reported the death of longtime member Eliyahu Margalit, 76 years old; his daughter was among the eight hostages released by Hamas on Thursday. The deaths of Guy Illouz, 26, and Ofra Keidar, 70, were reported by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.

Earlier on Friday, three other hostages were declared dead by Kibbutz Nir Oz. The deceased were identified as Aryeh Zalmanovich, 85, Maya Goren, 56, and Ronen Engel, 54. Engel’s wife and daughters were also abducted and taken to Gaza, but released earlier this week. Hamas had said that Zalmanovich had died, in a video it released last month. The determinations of death were made by a committee of experts, which relied on classified information, according to health officials.

The committee was able to determine with certainty that they are dead, despite not having access to their bodies, which likely remain in Gaza, the officials said. The Israeli military also said Friday that it had recovered the body of hostage Ofir Tzarfati, 27, from the Gaza Strip and brought him for burial in Israel.

Israel’s military offensive has killed more than 15,000 Gazans, Hamas-controlled authorities in Gaza say, most of them women and children. That figure doesn’t distinguish civilians from militants.

The Palestinian militants who raided Israel in the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7 killed around 1,200 people, abducted over 240 civilians and soldiers and brought them back to the Gaza Strip.

The renewed fighting has the potential to exacerbate a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where a surge in aid during the truce had only just begun alleviating shortages in water, food and fuel.

Evacuation of foreigners from Gaza to Egypt as well as flow of aid trucks going through the Rafah crossing came to a halt after the truce expired and fighting resumed, Egyptian officials familiar with the matter said.

At Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah City in southern Gaza, the bodies of several people killed in the fresh bombing were collected on the ground outside, wrapped in white body bags and labelled with their names. Inside, doctors said they were treating dozens of injured people.

Ramadan Miqdad and his wife Fatten, who were displaced from Gaza City after the war began, were grieving over their daughter, Joury, who was killed Friday morning when the home they were sheltering in Rafah was bombed.

“I want to make you a birthday party, you are only five years old,” said Fatten, cursing the Israeli bombardment.

A day after Blinken called for a “protection plan” to limit further civilian casualties in Gaza, Israel published an interactive map dividing the coastal enclave into hundreds of numbered zones that it said residents should consult for instructions about where to move to avoid active combat.

The map was released in Arabic “in preparation for the next stages of the war,” said Avichay Adraee, the Israeli military’s Arabic-language spokesman, in a statement on X. The numbered areas correspond to “known neighbourhoods in order to allow Gazans to orient themselves, understand instructions, and move from specific places if they are asked to do so. This is to ensure their safety,” he added, advising them to “follow the map carefully.” The Israeli military dropped leaflets in the southern Gaza Strip warning people to “leave immediately and head towards shelters” in the Rafah area, at the southernmost tip of Gaza. Khan Younis, a city in the south, “is a dangerous war zone,” the leaflets said.

Israel’s government said their plan for the operation in southern Gaza emphasised safe neighbourhoods where civilians can go, the U.S. official said. Blinken stressed that the large number of people who were displaced in the north of Gaza due to Israel’s campaign must not be repeated in the south, where there are fewer places for people to go, the official said.

Netanyahu and members of his war cabinet said that they couldn’t guarantee that strikes on certain areas populated by civilians wouldn’t be necessary if Hamas fighters had taken refuge among them, the official said.

Blinken travelled to Dubai Friday where he met with his Arab counterparts from the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates to discuss the war and concerns about a broader conflict.

“I made clear that after a pause, it was imperative that Israel put in place clear protections for civilians, and for sustaining humanitarian assistance going forward,” Blinken told reporters Friday. “And as we’ve seen, just today, Israel has already moved on parts of that, including sending out information making it clear where people can be in safe areas in Gaza.”

– Stephen Kalin contributed to this article.

The Wall Street Journnal