Clashes in Gaza Reveal Cease-Fire’s Fragility, With Rougher Road Ahead

Ten days into a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, relief is giving way to grim acknowledgments of the truce’s tenuousness, and of the need for continued outside intervention to keep it alive, let alone to make further progress.

A new round of violence on Sunday showed just how arduous the road to a broader agreement in Gaza will be between two sides, which have repeatedly accused each other of violating the truce.

Two Israeli soldiers were killed and another was wounded when Palestinian militants launched an anti-tank missile at an army vehicle, the Israeli military said. The attack took place in Rafah, in southern Gaza, on the Israeli-held eastern side of the cease-fire line. Israel called it a blatant violation of the agreement’s terms. Hamas officials were quick to disavow the attack.

Israel responded quickly, with a punishing bombardment of what it described as Hamas installations and Gaza officials said that 44 Palestinians were killed across the territory on Sunday. Israel said it was cutting off the supply of humanitarian aid to the devastated territory indefinitely, but later tempered that, saying that aid deliveries would be paused only until the bombardment was over.

Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, demanded an immediate, open-ended resumption of Israel’s offensive against Hamas. “War!” he wrote in a one-word post on X.

But the short-lived, if intense, Israeli military response, and the walk-back of the threat to shut off the flow of aid into Gaza, suggested the restraining influence of U.S. officials, analysts said.