http://archive.today/2025.03.18-205133/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-hamas-war.html

For weeks, Israel and Hamas had been locked in fruitless negotiations to extend the fragile cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and exchange more Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners.

The talks stalled because Hamas refused to release significant numbers of hostages unless Israel promised to permanently end the war — a commitment Israel would not make unless Hamas agreed to give up power in Gaza.

Now, Israel appears to have returned to war in an attempt to crush Hamas’s hopes of retaining control of the territory.

The Israeli government said that the resumption of airstrikes was intended to expedite the hostages’ release by putting Hamas under more pressure to compromise. The government’s domestic critics said the strikes actually endangered the hostages since they foreclosed any immediate chance of their negotiated release.

Israel’s heavy aerial attacks on Gaza early on Tuesday stopped short of an immediate ground invasion. But they could develop into a full ground operation if Hamas refuses to give up control of Gaza, according to two Israeli military officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak more freely.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has already reaped domestic rewards from the strikes. Hours after they began, a far-right party rejoined Mr. Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, bolstering the government’s fragile majority in Parliament, weeks after it left the alliance to protest the initial truce.

Critics said that the return to war was mainly an attempt to shore up Mr. Netanyahu’s fragile coalition ahead of a tight vote in Parliament on a new national budget. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right lawmaker who quit the government in January in protest of the cease-fire deal, led his party back into the coalition on Tuesday, praising the military action as “the right, moral, ethical and most justified step.”