This Tuesday, Israel resumed bombing of the Gaza Strip. Shortly before, the office of Israel’s prime minister, , announced that it had ordered the army to carry out “forceful attacks” and “immediately” on the Gaza Strip. According to the Ministry of Defense, this is a response to an attack against Israeli troops near Rafah. The statement from Netanyahu’s office does not provide more details, but assures that the decision has been made in “security consultations” with his Cabinet, which Netanyahu had convened hours before, after the Palestinian militia Hamas handed over the remains of an Israeli who did not correspond to any in the enclave.
The new offensive responds to the exchange of fire that some Israeli media had reported minutes before in Rafah, where Israeli troops were attacked this Tuesday. The diary The Times of Israel He assures that soldiers of the Jewish State stationed in that southern municipality of the enclave have been assaulted by “terrorist agents”, without linking the action to the Palestinian militia Hamas, and adds that Israeli troops have responded by opening fire on the attackers.
Although the incident in question occurred in the south of the Strip, testimonies collected by different news agencies in Gaza City – the largest urban center of the enclave – have reported shortly after the resumption of aerial bombardments in the area, while images broadcast by the Qatari media outlet Al Jazeera show columns of smoke rising over the buildings.
The assault on Rafah and Netanyahu’s rapid response are reminiscent of the incidents that put Gaza under control on October 19, after members of Hamas acting on their own—according to the White House version—launched a surprise attack against the Israeli army, causing the death of two Israeli soldiers.
Those attacks left more than thirty fatalities in the enclave, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa, in an operation in which Israel dropped 153 tons of bombs, as Netanyahu has recalled in almost every public intervention since then, in an attempt to highlight the cost of breaking the truce in the enclave, which came into force on October 10.
The atmosphere was already heated before the outbreak of violence this Tuesday in Rafah. Different Israeli media outlets have released aerial images taken on Monday by an Israeli drone in which they claim that Hamas members can be seen hiding the remains of Ofir Tzarfati underground – an Israeli whose body troops rescued at the end of 2023 – before communicating their discovery to Red Cross teams. “The images show how the terrorist organization tries to create the false impression that it is making efforts to find the bodies,” denounced the Israeli army, which maintains that Hamas is lying when it refers to the difficulty of finding the bodies.
Later, when these remains were examined in Israel and it was found that they did not correspond to any of the 13 hostage bodies that Hamas has yet to find and hand over under the ceasefire agreement – it has already returned the remains of another 15 – Netanyahu called for “security consultations” with his Cabinet, which led to the order to resume the full-scale offensive.
According to the public broadcaster Kan, Netanyahu would be considering the possibility of expanding Israeli control in the Strip, beyond the half that the current first phase of the truce grants him, in response to what he interprets as violations by Hamas. Similarly, the militia, which had announced that it would hand over a new body on Tuesday night – which the Saudi media Al Hadath indicates that it has been found in Nuseirat, in the center of the Strip—has warned in a statement that “any Zionist escalation [en relación a Israel] It will hinder the search” for bodies and “delay” the delivery that was scheduled for this Tuesday.
