Hamas Rocket Barrage Stirs Debate in Israel Over Direction of War

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.

Before the war, the Israeli military estimated that Hamas and other groups in Gaza had an arsenal of over 10,000 rockets, but officials have said recently that well over 12,000 have been fired at Israel during the war.

How many remain in the hands of Hamas and its allies is unclear. Israel Ziv, a retired general who formerly commanded Israeli forces in Gaza, told the Reuters news agency that 10 percent to 15 percent of Hamas’s prewar rocketry corps of some 1,000 militants were believed to be still alive and that the group had around 2,000 rockets remaining.

Israeli officials have said in recent weeks that their campaign against Hamas is shifting to a more targeted phase amid rising international criticism over the civilian death toll and humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian enclave.

On Monday, the Israeli military withdrew a division from northern Gaza, part of a broader drawdown of forces aimed, in part, at relieving the war’s strain on Israel’s economy. After the rocket barrage on Tuesday morning, right-wing members of Mr. Netanyahu’s wartime government called for an urgent re-examination of that decision.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, said the decision to withdraw some soldiers was “a serious, grave error that will cost lives.” Mr. Ben-Gvir, one of Mr. Netanyahu’s most hawkish allies, has called for Israel to reoccupy Gaza indefinitely.

The rocket barrage “proves that conquering Gaza is essential to realizing the war’s goals,” Mr. Ben-Gvir said in a statement.

The Biden administration has pressured Israel to restrain its offensive, in order to reduce civilian casualties and to allow people displaced from northern Gaza to go home — though the Israeli government insists they will not be able to return soon. At a news briefing on Tuesday, John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, said, “We hope that the removal of these troops and this announced transition that they’ve made will allow people to go back into northern Gaza.”

In the first weeks of the war, Hamas-led militants had fired near-constant dozens of rockets across Israel, sending scores of Israelis rushing to fortified shelters. But the rocket fire has slowed down as Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground offensive have worn on, and as Israeli forces have conquered large swathes of Gaza.

A Hamas official said the slowdown was a strategic decision, not a sign of a severely depleted arsenal, adding that the group had sufficient weapons to keep fighting for many months.

“It’s quite clear this war will carry on for a long time,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the news media. “It’s common sense that they are not going to launch everything they have now.”

Israel’s goals “have proven to be fantasies,” he said, adding, “The strike on Netivot today is proof that Israel’s strategy isn’t working.”

On Monday, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said that Israel had concluded its “intensive” ground operations in northern Gaza and would soon wrap up that stage of fighting in the south. He said at a news conference that Israeli forces had successfully taken apart Hamas’s armed battalions in the north and were “now working to eliminate pockets of resistance,” describing the Israeli military’s achievements as “very impressive.”

Israeli leaders have continued to tell the public to expect the fighting to go on for months, even as the military has announced the deaths of at least 185 Israeli soldiers since the ground invasion began in late October.

“It is a mistake to reduce the strength of the Israeli military’s activities in Gaza and the forces deployed there in the current situation,” Gideon Sa’ar, an opposition lawmaker from the National Unity alliance who joined the emergency government formed after the war began, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Mr. Netanyahu has sought to project confidence that Israel’s offensive in Gaza will allow tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes near the Gaza border to return home, but the continued rocket attacks have dampened those hopes.

“We are determined to rebuild the towns and kibbutzim in the so-called Gaza periphery, to send residents home and bring even more prosperity than there was before the war,” Mr. Netanyahu told local leaders in southern Israel on Tuesday, according to a statement from his office. “But for that, we first need to defeat Hamas.”

Sergey Davidov, who runs a carwash in Netivot, the city targeted by Palestinian rocket fire on Tuesday, said the number of his clients had dwindled since the beginning of the war. Some were Israeli reservists who had been called up to fight, he said, while others were uneasy about making the journey to the border area.

“I feel the government has our backs economically,” including by providing aid to businesses affected by the war, said Mr. Davidov, who like most Israelis supports the war against Hamas. “But in terms of security? Not quite.”

Thomas Fuller contributed reporting from San Francisco.