Blinken said the Israeli government had agreed to “a clear plan” to avert civilian deaths before it resumed its assault on southern Gaza, amid intensifying U.S. pressure on Tel Aviv to reduce the war’s grave humanitarian toll.
By Blinken’s account, he was forceful with Israeli leaders and received assurances that they would change how they wage the war.
Speaking on the sidelines of the U.N. climate conference Friday in Dubai, Blinken blamed Hamas for ending the temporary truce. The militant group “began firing rockets before the pause had ended,” he said, and “reneged on commitments it made in terms of releasing certain hostages.”
Blinken praised Israeli efforts to protect Palestinian civilians, “including making sure that they have the information they need, and that there are ways to accommodate them.”
The Gaza Health Ministry reported Friday that 178 Palestinians had died after hostilities resumed.
The sides agreed to the pause, and extended it twice to allow the exchange of hostages kidnapped from Israel during raids by Hamas and other fighters on Oct. 7 for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons and to increase the amount of humanitarian aid entering Gaza.
Blinken said the Biden administration would continue its efforts to free the remaining hostages. “We’re still at this,” he said, but he acknowledged it would depend on Hamas’s willingness to give up the people it captured on Oct. 7.
Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, confirmed early Friday that fighting had resumed in Gaza. “We are back at it,” he said. “Now we are preparing for the next stage — southern Gaza.”
As the bombs began to fall, they were accompanied by leaflets in southern Gaza, where most people in the north have fled in the two months of war, warning that they were now in combat zones. The IDF also announced an interactive map to tell residents when to leave their areas — part of its effort to reduce civilian casualties. The enclave has struggled with internet connectivity.
Government spokesman Eylon Levy blamed Hamas for the resumption in fighting.
“Unfortunately, Hamas decided to terminate the pause by failing to release all the kidnapped women as it was obligated to do,” he told reporters. He said the group had failed to provide a full list of hostages it intended to release Friday. “So having chosen to hold on to our women, Hamas will now take the mother of all thumpings.”
Hamas countered that it was Israel that ended the truce when it rejected an offer to release elderly Palestinian prisoners in exchange for elderly male Israeli hostages and the bodies of three Israeli hostages, including two children from the Bibas family.
“The Israelis refused, and it is clear that they have made a decision,” Osama Hamdan, a senior Hamas official in Beirut, told The Washington Post in a voice message. “The aggression against the Gaza Strip preceded the resumption of the fighting, so the one who ended the negotiation situation and thwarted all the efforts made was the Israeli side.”
Qatar, which has been hosting the talks over the pause in fighting for the past weeks, expressed its “deep regret at the resumption of the Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip” and said the renewed bombing of Gaza complicates the still-ongoing mediation.
A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss closed-door talks, suggested that the breakdown came because Hamas may have released all or nearly all of the hostages it appears to be willing to release for now. “We’re at the end of the line.”
Israel said Friday that there were still 137 hostages in Gaza, the vast majority of them men, including many soldiers. Hamas is said to be calling for more prisoners to be released than the three-Palestinians-for-each-hostage ratio of the pause.
During the week-long pause, Hamas released more than 100 Israeli and international hostages, most of them women and children, and Israel released 240 Palestinian prisoners, also women and juveniles, many of them detained for rock-throwing and incitement.
Hamas and other fighters streamed out of Gaza early on Oct. 7 to attack Israeli towns near the enclave. They killed around 1,200 people and took 240 more as hostages. Israel has responded with a military campaign that leaders say is aimed at eradicating Hamas from Gaza.
Since the Hamas attack, Israel has detained around 3,400 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Commission for Detainees and ex-Prisoners’ Affairs. The Gaza Health Ministry said last week that the Israeli military campaign had caused more than 13,300 deaths, but communication challenges and no-go areas have made it impossible to produce a complete count.
Reem, a mother in Gaza City’s central Rimal neighborhood, a focus of the fighting, heard the boom of tank fire Friday morning and sprang into action.
“When we heard the sounds, we told the kids to prepare their things in case we had to go,” she told The Post by phone. She spoke on the condition that her last name be withheld to protect her privacy.
“We told them to move away from the windows,” she said. “All of the things that we became accustomed to during the war, we returned to that today.”
The family moved down to a neighbor’s ground-floor apartment, hoping it would be safer. As she spoke, two blasts boomed in the background.
Reem had not expected Israel’s air and ground assault resume Friday. “Unfortunately, we had hope until the last minute that the cease-fire would be extended,” she said. “We hadn’t prepared ourselves psychologically for the return to war.”
While aid increased during the pause, the World Food Program warned that it was not nearly enough to stave off the growing risk of famine and starvation.
James Elder, a spokesman for the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, told The Post that the bombardment in southern Gaza was constant.
“I can hear attacks everywhere, airstrikes,” Elder said in a telephone interview from the enclave. “It’s relentless,” he said, and streets were “emptying out.” He had just left the al-Nasser hospital, which he said was “on life support.” There was not enough medical staff and not enough space for the flood of patients. The hospital was at “200 percent capacity,” he said.
During the pause, Elder joined aid convoys traveling to northern Gaza. “The way up is just devastation,” he said. He saw homes and apartment blocks that had been destroyed, he said, trash piling up in the streets and the “stunned faces of those who decided to stay.”
As the Israeli offensive roared back into operation, he said, people in southern Gaza were “terrified about having to move.”
“There is nowhere to move to,” he said. “It’s not a cliché to say that nowhere is safe.”
According to U.S. officials, Israel intends to designate some neighborhoods in southern Gaza as “deconfliction areas.” One official said Israeli operations in the south would in some ways resemble a counterterrorism operation, and that the Israelis had committed to not attacking the urban areas of Khan Younis and Rafah with the intensity with which they attacked Gaza City, where more than 60 percent of residences are now estimated to be damaged or destroyed.
Yet on Friday, the IDF dropped leaflets on Khan Younis declaring the city a “dangerous combat zone,” and directed residents to move further south to Rafah near the Egyptian border.
Birnbaum reported from Dubai, Fahim reported from Beirut, and Booth reported from London. Paul Schemm in London and Hazem Balousha in Amman contributed to this report.
