US President Donald Trump gave his full support to Israel's ceasefire-breaking strikes, which reportedly killed at least 104 Palestinians, including 40 children, while wounding another 253 people on Tuesday and into Wednesday.
Airstrikes devastated Gaza City, Khan Yunis, and refugee camps in central Gaza, hitting homes, tents, and the courtyard of a hospital, according to Middle East Eye, leaving many of the wounded in critical condition and many others trapped beneath rubble.
The director of Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City described the situation as "catastrophic," with two years of destruction and a punishing Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid having left the hospital with no medicine or medical supplies to treat the wounded.
In remarks aboard Air Force One on Wednesday, Trump said that Israel carried out the strikes after a 37-year-old Israeli soldier was reportedly killed by Hamas in southern Gaza.
“As I understand it, they took out an Israeli soldier," Trump said. "So the Israelis hit back, and they should hit back. When that happens, they should hit back." Trump described the carnage as "retribution" for the soldier's death, for which Hamas has denied responsibility.
In addition to the soldier's killing, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Tuesday's strikes also came after Hamas returned only partial remains of an Israeli hostage, Ofir Tzarfati, who died in captivity after being abducted and taken to Gaza on October 7, 2023. Israel has claimed that Hamas attempted to “stage a false discovery” of the body for the international Red Cross “to create a false impression of efforts to locate the bodies”.
As part of the ceasefire agreement, Hamas has returned the living Israeli hostages and is also required to return the remains of those who died during the two years of Israeli bombardment. As of Monday, the remains of 16 hostages had been handed over, but 13 still remain, with Hamas saying it has struggled to locate them in the delapidated Gaza Strip, which has been largely reduced to rubble by Israel's aerial campaign.
Chris Gunness, a former spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), argued that the Trump deal was “set up to fail” using the provision requiring the return of captives' remains.
"There were so many bodies under so much rubble," Gunness said in an interview with AJ+. "There was so much confusion after two years of genocide. It was going to be very difficult for anybody to deliver the bodies and the captives given what has been going on. So Israel has a pretext to call off the plan, to reimpose the blockade, to restart the genocide if it wants to."
After Tuesday’s deadly bombings, Israel said Wednesday it had "resumed" the ceasefire. But even before the attacks removed any doubt, the ceasefire appeared to be in name only. In a press release before the bombing began, the Gaza Media Office alleged that Israel had already committed 125 violations of the agreement.
Between October 11, when the ceasefire went into effect, and October 28, nearly 100 Palestinians were killed and over 300 wounded in near-daily attacks by Israel, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. This is despite the fact that the agreement stated explicitly that "all military operations, including aerial and artillery bombardment and targeting operations, will be suspended.”
Israel has also not abided by requirements that it allow the “immediate commencement of full entry of humanitarian aid.” In what it said was a response to Hamas’ failure to return hostage remains, Israel announced last week that it had closed the critical Rafah crossing, and just 15% of the aid called for in the plan has been allowed to enter Gaza, where 55,000 children are suffering from acute malnutrition according to a Lancet report released last week.
As bombs rained down on Gaza on Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance asserted that "the ceasefire is holding," but that it "doesn't mean that there aren't going to be little skirmishes."
The next day, Trump insisted that even after Israel’s colossal violation of the ceasefire, “nothing is going to jeopardize” the agreement, which he and many in the press have raced to portray as a historic victory for his legacy as a peacemaker.
But Mouin Rabbani, a fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies, told Al Jazeera that even while claiming to respect the ceasefire, Israel was clearly looking for any excuse it could find to resume the state of war.
"Israel was unwilling to enter this agreement, was dragged into it by the United States, and has been seeking to erode it ever since," Rabbani said.
He said he believes the US will not allow Israel to cross the "red line" of resuming "full-scale war," but that "by showing indulgence for lesser infractions, we're on a downward slope where Israel is able to erode the terms of the agreement with increasing violence, with increasing frequency, until there is nothing left."
He noted that the US now has a military command center directly in Israel with the stated purpose of "monitoring" the ceasefire.
"Arab, Israeli, and international press reports have all referred to this as 'Bibi-sitting,' basically reflecting American concerns that Israel is going to unilaterally abrogate this agreement," he said. “What this means is that the United States is now, to a much greater degree than previously, directly responsible for what happens in the Gaza Strip.”
