Israeli forces resumed attacks in the Gaza Strip after a two-day pause requested by mediators and the United States to allow progress in ceasefire talks hosted by Cairo in recent days, where the parties agreed on wording related to the issue of weapons. Palestinian factions had asked mediators to stop violations and assassinations in Gaza as a condition for advancing the talks, sources told Asharq Al-Awsat at the time. Mediators then contacted US President Donald Trump’s administration and the Board of Peace to press Israel, before an agreement was reached on halting attacks for several days. Assassinations and destroyed residential blocks The airstrikes stopped from dawn Tuesday until Thursday afternoon, then resumed with attacks targeting operatives from Palestinian factions and fresh strikes on residential blocks. Israel used the same approach in the previous round of talks, when it halted airstrikes for two days before resuming them. The first strike on Thursday targeted member of the al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades, the armed wing of the Popular Resistance Committees, one of the factions that joined the Cairo talks. He was wounded after being hit on the roof of his family home north of Nuseirat camp in central Gaza. About two hours later, another strike targeted a member of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, in the Sabra neighborhood south of Gaza City as he stood on the roof of his family home. He was killed immediately. Asharq Al-Awsat learned he was one of the most prominent members in Qassam’s engineering unit. Roughly three hours later, an Israeli drone struck two young men west of Nuseirat camp in central Gaza, killing one of them. He was a prominent field operative in the Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Islamic Jihad, based in the Jabalia camp. At night, Israeli warplanes struck two small rooms and farmland near Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, destroying the site. They later destroyed two homes and damaged a residential block in Maghazi camp in central Gaza. Later, they destroyed several homes and shops and damaged others after bombing another nearby residential block in the same camp. The bombing displaced dozens of families who lost their only shelter. Israel has stepped up attacks on intact residential blocks, or those only slightly damaged during the war, especially in the central area, one of the least damaged parts of Gaza and an area where Israeli forces have not carried out major operations. On Friday, four Palestinians were wounded in shooting incidents and artillery shelling near the yellow line. A young man survived after a drone struck the vehicle he was riding in deep in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. No injuries were reported. Israeli forces also expanded the yellow line in the Tuffah neighborhood east of Gaza City, specifically along Salah al-Din Street, in the fourth such operation in about a month and a half. Hazem Qassem, a Hamas spokesperson, said in a press statement that moving the yellow line, along with the bombardment and displacement that accompanied it, was a flagrant violation of the ceasefire agreement. He said it reflected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s threats to increase Israel’s control over Gaza, amid the silence of the Board of Peace and the inability of mediating and guarantor states to stop the violations. He said the aim was to blow up the negotiating track and the recent positive atmosphere. Negative response The escalation came despite mediators’ success in reaching wording with Hamas and seven other Palestinian factions, in the absence of Fatah, on the clauses of a road map presented by Nickolay Mladenov, the high representative for Gaza at the Board of Peace. The most sensitive clause concerned weapons, stating that they would be confined and stored rather than handed over, and that this would be done through a Palestinian body, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza. In return, the committee would enter Gaza and assume its duties, Israel would withdraw, and the humanitarian protocol from the first phase would be implemented. Hamas and the Palestinian factions had been waiting for Israel’s response to what had been agreed. By Thursday evening, they had received neither a positive nor a negative reply. A source from Hamas told Asharq Al-Awsat that the renewed escalation amounted to a clear response from Netanyahu’s government rejecting the wording, adding that the movement would wait for the official response from mediators. Asharq Al-Awsat learned that parties outside the mediating states, as well as parties within the Board of Peace and the Gaza administration committee, support the wording reached on Gaza’s weapons and see it as an opportunity to build on.
