Israel has resumed air strikes in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday after an Egyptian-proposed ceasefire that Tel Aviv agreed to, failed to stop Hamas militants from halting rocket attacks.
Israel had earlier accepted an Egyptian ceasefire proposal and halted operations on Tuesday morning but Hamas defied Arab and Western calls to cease fire and rejected the initiative as a “surrender”.
Hamas’ armed wing, the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, rejected the ceasefire deal, a proposal that addressed, in only general terms, some of its key demands, and said its battle with Israel would “increase in ferocity and intensity”.
A top Hamas political official, Moussa Abu Marzouk, who was in Cairo, said the movement, which is seeking a deal that would ease Egyptian and Israeli border restrictions throttling Gaza’s economy, had made no final decision on Cairo’s proposal.
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had warned that if the rocket fire continued, Israel would hit back hard.
Israel had also threatened to step up a week-old offensive that could include an invasion of the densely populated enclave of 1.8 million.
Thus, Israel resumed attacks in Gaza hours after implementation of the truce was to have begun.
The military said it targeted at least 20 of Hamas’s hidden rocket launchers, tunnels and weapons storage facilities.
A Palestinian civilian was, reportedly, killed in an air strike in Khan Younis, raising the death toll in the Gaza Strip in eight days of fighting to 188, including at least 150 civilians, among them 31 children, according to Gaza medical officials.
There have been no huge fatalities in Israel, largely due to Iron Dome, but the rocket salvoes have made a rush to shelters a daily routine for hundreds of thousands of people across the country.
The surge in hostilities over the past week was prompted by the murder last month of three Jewish seminary students in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the revenge killing on July 2 of a Palestinian youth in Jerusalem.
Israel said on Monday that three Jews in police custody had confessed to killing the Palestinian.
