Israel Launches Deadly Strikes in Gaza, in Cease-Fire Breakdown: Live Updates - The New York Times

Live Updates: Israel Launches Deadly Strikes on Gaza, in Breakdown of Cease-Fire

The assaults targeting Hamas killed more than 400 people, local officials said, and were the first major strikes in Gaza since both sides agreed to a truce in January.

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March 18, 2025, 11:53 a.m. ET22 minutes ago

Ephrat LivniAaron BoxermanPatrick KingsleyYan Zhuang and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad

Here are the latest developments.

Israeli forces launched intense aerial attacks across the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, killing more than 400 people, according to Gazan officials, breaking a temporary cease-fire with Hamas and raising the prospect of a return to all-out war.

The office of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said he had ordered the military operation following the “repeated refusal” by Hamas to release the hostages remaining in Gaza. “From now on, Israel will act against Hamas with increasing military strength,” the statement warned.

Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, also said the military had “launched a series of pre-emptive strikes against Hamas terror targets in Gaza” after receiving information that Hamas was “actively planning and preparing to carry out further terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and I.D.F. soldiers.”

“These strikes targeted Hamas military commanders, officials in Hamas’ leadership and terrorist infrastructure,” he said in a statement.

The attacks followed weeks of fruitless negotiations aimed at extending the fragile cease-fire, which paused 15 months of devastating fighting in the territory.

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 2 of the cease-fire, which called for an end to the war and the release of all living hostages, led to this escalation.”

The Israeli military announced just before 2:30 a.m. local time that it was conducting “extensive strikes” on Hamas targets. Hundreds of Palestinians, including children, were killed, according to the Gazan health ministry, whose figures do not differentiate between civilians and combatants.

Hamas accused Israel of deciding to “overturn the cease-fire agreement, exposing the prisoners in Gaza to an unknown fate,” referring to the hostages. The group, however, did not immediately respond militarily to the attacks.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said Israel had consulted the White House before launching the strikes. The United States recently began a wave of attacks in Yemen against the Houthi militant group, which, like Hamas, is backed by Iran. The Houthis had fired missiles and drones at Israel for more than a year in solidarity with Hamas.

“As President Trump has made clear, Hamas, the Houthis, all those who seek to terrorize not just Israel but also the United States of America, will see a price to pay,” Ms. Leavitt told Fox News on Monday night. “All hell will break loose.”

Before the Israeli assault, Israel and Hamas had been negotiating the next steps in the truce. The next phase 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.

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

Here’s what else to know:

• Militants killed: Hamas announced the deaths of at least five senior officials in Gaza. 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, 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. Hamas views them as bargaining chips.

• Fear and frustration: After two months of relative quiet, the strikes left Gazans with an unmistakable message: The war had returned, at least for now.

• 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.

March 18, 2025, 12:15 p.m. ET1 minute ago

Aaron Boxerman

Reporting from Jerusalem

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

Image

Palestinians near the bodies of their relatives in Gaza City on Tuesday.Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times

Israel’s wave of airstrikes against Hamas in Gaza on Tuesday killed hundreds in what Gazan health officials said was one of the war’s deadlier single-day tolls.

More than 400 people were killed in the attacks, including women and children, according to the Gaza health ministry. Those figures could not be independently verified and do not distinguish between militants and civilians. Hamas confirmed the deaths of five officials in its Gaza leadership, including top officials who oversaw internal security.

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.

Jabaliya

Israel carried out 

deadly airstrikes 

across Gaza.

Gaza

City

Sderot

GAZA STRIP

ISRAEL

Nuseirat

Mediterranean

Sea

Deir

al Balah

Netivot

Israel called for residents 

to evacuate areas in red, 

emphasizing two zones

in particular.

Khan

Younis

Ofakim

Rafah

EGYPT

5 Miles

Sources: Israeli military (evacuation zones); aftermath photos and New York Times reporting (strike locations)

By Samuel Granados, Pablo Robles and Sanjana Varghese

March 18, 2025, 12:08 p.m. ET8 minutes ago

Ephrat Livni

A spokesman for the Israeli military, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said in a statement on Tuesday that Israel struck in Gaza to prevent planned attacks on Israelis. “Upon receiving indications that Hamas was actively planning and preparing to carry out further terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians” and soldiers, the military “launched a series of preemptive strikes against Hamas terror targets in Gaza.”

March 18, 2025, 12:08 p.m. ET8 minutes ago

Ephrat Livni

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.

March 18, 2025, 12:02 p.m. ET14 minutes ago

Adam Rasgon

Reporting from Jerusalem

Hamas does not respond to renewed Israeli attack.

Image

Hamas fighters during a handover of Israeli hostages last month.Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times

Hours after Israel launched a massive bombing campaign across Gaza on Tuesday, Hamas’s military wing had not mounted a discernible counterattack.

It was by far the deadliest day since a cease-fire in Gaza began about two months ago. The Gaza health ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants, said that more than 400 people had been killed in the aerial bombardment that started before dawn.

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.

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 this article."

Israel Launches Deadly Strikes in Gaza, in Cease-Fire Breakdown: Live Updates - The New York Times