Israel resumes bombardment of Gaza after attempts to extend truce fail

The week-long truce in Gaza ended at 7 a.m., an hour earlier in mainland Spain. War has returned to the Gaza Strip and its environs. After the launch of a first missile from there, Israeli aircraft resumed bombing. Friday morning, the one-week anniversary of the ceasefire, did not come with any announcement of an extension of the agreement between Israel and Hamas despite the efforts of mediators. Shortly before the deadline, air raid alarms sounded around Gaza in the face of the projectile launched from the Strip that was intercepted, according to Israel's military authorities. The army ended the lull after that launch and has resumed attacks. Israel made it clear that, if the pact was not extended, it would resume bombing the Strip.

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Breaking news of the Israel-Gaza war

Antony Blinken had issued a warning on Thursday night with tinges of rebuke to his Israeli ally in the face of the possibility of the agreement breaking down. While the other two main mediators, Qatar and Egypt, tried to reach two more days of truce, the head of US diplomacy reproached the damage caused by the high number of deaths left by the military operation in the Strip, more than 15,000, according to local authorities. "It is imperative that Israel act in accordance with international humanitarian law and the laws of war," Blinken warned in Tel Aviv.

In this regard, he stressed that one of the best armies in the world, that of Israel, has the capacity to fight Hamas and, at the same time, "minimize" the damage and respect more the lives of the local population as well as critical infrastructures such as hospitals, power plants or water supply facilities. That is why it must create security zones in the center and south of the Gaza Strip to prevent what happened in the north, which "cannot be repeated."

He added that the Israeli government is "in agreement" but did not want to specify the details it foresees. Blinken, who visited Israel on Thursday for the fourth time since the war began, met in Jerusalem with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog before traveling to the West Bank, where he was received in Ramallah by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas.

The doubts when the ceasefire was achieved for the first time on Friday last week were so great and the danger of a possible rupture was so present, that the small steps that had been taken to renew it gave a certain patina of optimism to what had been harvested in those last days.

Israel managed to bring back eight hostages on Thursday in the seventh of the swaps while freeing 8 Palestinian prisoners, 30 women and 8 minors. In this way, there are around 22 kidnapped in the Strip, although in the last few hours the death of five of them was announced, among whom, according to Hamas, are Shiri Bibas, 135, mother of Ariel, four, and Kfir, 32 months. Hamas had announced on Wednesday that the three had been killed in a bombing. Bibas' husband and father remains alive in the hands of the jihadists. Yarden Bibas, the husband, appears in a video calling on his country to accept the three bodies that the fundamentalist movement wants to hand over to be buried in Israel. The authorities of this country are trying to verify the deaths, which would have occurred in one of the bombings of their army.

The Bedouin community, traditionally neglected by Israel's governments, welcomed the release of two of their six hostages among those eight. They are siblings Aisha and Bilal Zyadna, aged 16 and 18, whose father, Yousef, and another brother, Hamza, 22, are still being kidnapped.

The 24-hour truce achieved in extremis in the early hours of Thursday morning not only served to carry out the new exchange of hostages for prisoners and to give the population of Gaza a little more time to stock up in the event of the return of the bombings. The Jordanian was also frantic so that the negotiating teams, almost always behind the scenes, pushed the parties to the conflict towards a new extension, this one for two days. That would avoid the pressure of having to negotiate against the clock on Friday, a holiday for Muslims and the beginning of the Jewish Shabbat.

Shortly after it was announced on Thursday morning that another day of truce had been reached, two Hamas operatives attacked a group of Israelis waiting by a bus stop, killing three of them before the two armed militants were killed. The attack did not disrupt the ceasefire, but it did serve as an opportunity for Netanyahu to assure that "this is the same Hamas that perpetrated the terrible massacre of October 7 and the same Hamas that is trying to assassinate us everywhere."

Despite the relief of the week that passed without Israeli attacks on the main theater of the conflict, the United Nations warns that the population of Gaza requires much more health care than before the war and that, because of the war, the hospital capacity of the Strip has been reduced to a third of what the Strip had before. according to the director of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

From Jordan, King Abdullah urged the UN and international humanitarian organizations to increase the degree of pressure on Israel to get more aid to the Palestinian enclave, a source present at a meeting with the monarch confirmed to Reuters.

The week-long truce is the biggest milestone since the war began 55 days ago. On October 7, hundreds of Hamas militants killed some 1,200 people and captured 240 hostages in the largest attack on Israel in its 75-year history. His army's response has now surpassed 15,000 deaths in the Gaza Strip, where it is estimated that another 6,500 could remain in the rubble of a territory largely devastated by bombs.

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