The Israeli defense minister tried on Friday to turn up the pressure on Hamas to release more hostages, saying Israel was preparing to seize more territory in Gaza and intensify attacks by air, sea and land if the armed Palestinian group does not cooperate.
The statement by the defense minister, Israel Katz, came days after a cease-fire that had been in place for more than two months was shattered with a renewed Israeli bombardment and limited ground operations inside Gaza. More than 500 Palestinians have been killed since Israel restarted attacks on Tuesday, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
“The more Hamas persists in its refusal, the more territory it will lose,” Mr. Katz said in demanding the release of more hostages.
There were no reports of new Israelis attacks with heavy casualties in Gaza on Friday morning. Mediators were still trying to prevent the new escalation of violence from snowballing back into a full-scale war. Hamas said Friday that negotiations to return to the truce — which began in mid-January — were still ongoing.
But Hamas reiterated that any agreement to free more hostages would have to lead to a permanent end to the war, which Israel has been loath to commit to while the Palestinian militant group still is in charge of Gaza.
Over the past three days, Israeli forces have bombarded targets across Gaza, saying they were attacking Hamas sites and operatives. Israeli ground troops have seized a major corridor in central Gaza from which it withdrew during the cease-fire with Hamas, and they have expanded ground raids in northern and southern Gaza.
Hamas’s military response so far has been limited, although the group is still believed to command tens of thousands of armed fighters. Hamas fired three rockets at Israel for the first time in months, but all were either intercepted or fell without causing casualties, a far cry from the barrages it could muster in the early months of the war.
Israel hopes to compel Hamas to free more of the remaining hostages seized in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that ignited the war in Gaza. As many as 24 living captives — and the remains of more than 30 others — are still in Gaza, according to the Israeli government.
Even before the cease-fire collapsed this week, Israel had blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, preventing shipments of food and medicine from reaching Palestinians still recovering from more than a year of hunger and wartime deprivation.
Mr. Katz threatened further actions, including intensified airstrikes and expanding the ongoing Israeli ground offensive. In the latest attacks, Israeli troops have yet to sweep through Palestinian cities in Gaza, divide the enclave in two or forcibly evacuate northern Gaza en masse, as they did during the 15-month campaign against Hamas.
Israel has vowed not to end the war in Gaza without Hamas’s destruction. Hamas has said it is willing to hand over civilian responsibilities in the enclave, but it has refused to disband its battalions of armed fighters or send its leaders there into exile.
Diplomats, including from the United States, are hoping to broker at least a partial deal to bring both sides back to the cease-fire, free more hostages and allow humanitarian aid to begin flowing into Gaza again.
Before the Israeli offensive, Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s Mideast envoy, had proposed an extension of the initial cease-fire, which elapsed in early March, in exchange for the release of hostages.
In the meantime, the United States and other mediators would work to find a “durable solution to this intractable conflict,” Mr. Witkoff’s office said in a statement last week.
Israel said it had accepted Mr. Witkoff’s plan, which accorded with Israeli demands for the release of more hostages without an immediate commitment to ending the war in Gaza permanently. Hamas did not immediately agree to the deal, but said earlier this week that it had been considering the proposal.
In an interview on Thursday in Doha, Qatar, Husam Badran, a senior Hamas official, suggested the group was willing to show some flexibility over such an agreement — including by potentially releasing more hostages — to jump-start talks aimed at ending the war.
“The problem isn’t the numbers,” Mr. Badran told The New York Times. “We’re acting positively with any proposal that leads to the start of negotiations” over a permanent truce, he added.
Adam Rasgon and Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting.
