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.
After all, both Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, who have teamed up as President Trump’s top envoys to the Middle East, are expected in Israel this week to try to push ahead with Mr. Trump’s peace plan. Vice President JD Vance told reporters late Sunday that he might also travel to Israel in the coming days.
“He’s not coming to jointly command Israeli strikes on Hamas,” Shira Efron, an Israeli analyst at RAND, said of the vice president.
Even Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing allies accused him of wilting under pressure from the Trump administration, and not for the first time. “Enough with the folding,” Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right minister, wrote on X.
Sunday’s violence was the heaviest wave of Israeli attacks on Gaza since the fragile cease-fire took hold. Other attacks have also punctured the calm. The Israeli military said last week that it had fired on a vehicle in northern Gaza, saying that the car had crossed a demarcation line where Israel’s forces have withdrawn to since the cease-fire — the so-called yellow line. Nine people, including children, were killed, according to Gazan officials.
“Israelis are really outraged about the killing of two soldiers, but it’s not like there haven’t been deaths of civilians in Gaza in the past week,” Ms. Efron said. “Both sides have pretexts to argue that the cease-fire has been violated. What keeps the negotiation going is the power that is brought by Trump and the mediators.”
Pressure is not only being applied on the Israeli government. After Hamas turned over the bodies of just four hostages last Monday — out of 28 believed to still be in Gaza — mediators from Egypt, Qatar and Turkey passed along Israeli intelligence about the whereabouts of some of the others, prodding the militant group to recover more, according to U.S. officials. As of Sunday, Hamas had turned over the remains of 12 captives.
As Hamas distanced itself from the Rafah attack, the group’s military wing reaffirmed its “full commitment” to putting the cease-fire into effect, even divulging that it had lost contact with its fighters in Rafah in March and did not know whether any of them were still alive.
That admission was one of several aspects of Sunday’s exchange of blows that laid bare the cease-fire’s fragility: If Hamas is indeed unable to control one of its fighting units, it may be unable to fully enforce its side of the cease-fir, making it less likely that Israel will fully withdraw.
The return of all the living hostages has also freed the Israeli military to retaliate against Hamas harder, whenever and wherever it chooses to strike, with no more fear of harming its own citizens, said Tamir Hayman, a former head of Israeli military intelligence who now leads the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
Though the violence on Sunday appeared to amount to a single, contained round, several analysts said they expected more such rounds to follow.
Michael Milshtein, an analyst at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University and a former expert on Palestinian affairs for the Israeli military, said that Hamas could be expected to continue to test Israel and see how it responds. And he said the yellow line between Israel- and Hamas-held territory was unmarked and difficult for Gaza residents to heed.
“Things are very unclear, very fragile and sensitive,” Mr. Milshtein said. “I’m afraid that it will lead us during the coming weeks to a kind of attrition — almost everyday violations, clashes and crises, big or more limited. And it will be an ongoing challenge.”
Still, Israeli analysts said the challenge of sustaining the cease-fire paled next to the challenge of advancing the Trump peace plan, particularly given that its call for Hamas to disarm effectively would require the group to renounce its entire ideology of armed resistance.
And Mr. Hayman said that Hamas was trying to sow fear and reestablish its dominance in Gaza, pointing to the executions by Hamas militants of eight rivals on a crowded Gaza City street last week.
“By doing that, they’re stronger, and it creates much more difficulties when you’re trying to demilitarize them,” Mr. Hayman said. “The appetite by Arab or Western countries to be deeply involved in demilitarization is decreasing by the hour.”
Mr. Milshtein said the past week had taught Israelis an unwelcome lesson about Hamas. “It’s very hard for many Israelis to admit, but they weren’t defeated,” he said. “They still exist, and they’re the dominant player in Gaza.”
Still, some Palestinian analysts said Hamas appeared eager to preserve the cease-fire agreement and might even be willing to offer more concessions to ensure the end of the war and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.
“Hamas wants to come down the tree, but in a dignified way,” said Mohammed al-Astal, an analyst in Gaza. “It needs an honorable exit ramp.”
Hamas would resist attempts by Mr. Netanyahu to disarm the group in a humiliating manner, Mr. al-Astal said. But if Hamas were given the opportunity to step away from power quietly and maintain some role in Gaza, it could pursue that path, he said. It might even be persuaded to turn over its weapons to another Palestinian entity, he suggested.
“It knows it has no other options,” Mr. al-Astal said. “It has been squeezed both inside and outside Gaza.”
Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.
David M. Halbfinger is on his second assignment as Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times, leading coverage of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. After his first tour there, from 2017 to 2021, he served as Politics editor, overseeing coverage of national politics, threats to democracy and the 2024 presidential campaign.
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