Hamas fighters in the northern Gaza Strip fired at least 25 rockets toward a nearby Israeli city on Tuesday, renewing right-wing criticism in Israel of the government’s decision to scale back some military operations in the war.
Hamas said in a statement that it had targeted the Israeli city of Netivot, about six miles from the Gaza border. Most of the rockets were either intercepted by Israel’s missile defense system or fell into open areas, and there were no immediate reports of casualties. But the Israeli police said that at least one building had been damaged.
The attack highlighted Hamas’s continuing ability to threaten Israeli civilians with rocket fire despite more than 100 days of a devastating Israeli air and ground offensive aimed at destroying the group’s military capabilities.
The rocket barrage also underlined the competing pressures Israeli leaders faced: the widespread popular demand to crush Hamas, the calls from right-wing politicians to be more aggressive in that campaign, the pleas by families of the hostages taken by Hamas to make concessions to secure their return and the outrage across the globe over the carnage and destruction in Gaza.
Israeli military analysts say the army has significantly degraded the rocket-launching capabilities of Hamas and other, smaller militant groups in Gaza since the beginning of the war, but has not eliminated them — a process they said could take months, if not longer, to complete.
“The continued firing of rockets tells us that we haven’t finished our mission,” Yaakov Amidror, a retired general who served as national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, said in an interview. “There are still areas that we need to clean up.”
More than 24,000 people in Gaza have been killed since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel sparked a full-blown war, according to Gazan health officials. Over 85 percent of Gaza’s residents have been displaced, and many are threatened by starvation and disease, according to the United Nations. The U.N. agency that helps Palestinian refugees said on Tuesday that the war had caused the largest displacement of the Palestinian people since the expulsion and flight of hundreds of thousands of them in the late 1940s, in the wars surrounding the creation of Israel.
“People in Gaza risk dying of hunger just miles from trucks filled with food,” Cindy McCain, who directs the World Food Program, said on Monday. “Every hour lost puts countless lives at risk.”
On Tuesday, Israel and Hamas confirmed that Qatar had brokered a deal between Israel and Hamas that would allow more medicines and other humanitarian aid to reach Gaza residents in exchange for delivering medication for Israeli captives held there.
