Israel Tries to Pressure Hamas to Free More Hostages

Israel’s defense minister said on Friday that the military was preparing to seize more territory in Gaza and escalate its offensive there unless Hamas cooperated by releasing more hostages.

The minister, Israel Katz, made the threats after a two-month cease-fire with Hamas collapsed this week when Israel restarted airstrikes and ground operations in Gaza. More than 500 Palestinians have been killed since the offensive began on Tuesday, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Mr. Katz threatened to expand a security zone inside Gaza where Israeli forces were already stationed and to order more Palestinians to evacuate territory unless Hamas frees more captives.

“The more Hamas persists in its refusal to free hostages, the more territory it will lose,” Mr. Katz said, adding that areas captured by Israel would be held indefinitely.

Mediators were still trying to prevent the new escalation of violence from snowballing back into a full-scale war.

There were no immediate reports of any Israeli attacks with heavy casualties in Gaza on Friday. The Israeli military said it had shot down two missiles aimed at southern Israel.

Hamas said Friday that negotiations to return to the truce — which began in mid-January — were still ongoing. But it 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 is still in charge of Gaza.

In Israel, domestic political turmoil over the war intensified this week with a decision by Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, to fire Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet intelligence service. Protesters have criticized Mr. Netanyahu for what they call an attempt to purge the security establishment of those he perceives as disloyal.

On Friday, Israel’s Supreme Court issued an order freezing Mr. Bar’s dismissal while the justices heard petitions that had been filed against it. The court ruled that the hearing would take place no later than April 8 — two days before the deadline for Mr. Bar’s removal to take effect.

Mr. Netanyahu’s allies quickly denounced the court for intervening as judicial overreach. If the court does strike down the government’s decision to dismiss the Shin Bet chief, the prime minister has yet to say whether he would uphold such a ruling.

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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 that they withdrew from under the cease-fire, and they have expanded ground operations in northern and southern Gaza.

Hamas has confirmed the deaths of at least five senior officials in its Gaza leadership since the offensive began. The Israeli military says it has killed others. On Friday, it said in a statement that it had killed Osama Tabash, a leader in Hamas’s military intelligence branch, in an airstrike the day before.

On Friday, the Israeli military bombarded the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital in central Gaza, saying it had struck militants operating there. The Israeli military said that the building was no longer being used as a medical center. Israeli soldiers had used the hospital for months as a base themselves last year before withdrawing.

Hamas’s military response to renewed Israeli attacks has so far been limited. The group’s military capabilities were significantly degraded by the war, although it is still believed to command tens of thousands of armed fighters. Israeli officials say Hamas has been using the cease-fire to regroup, plan for future fighting and to plant explosive devices.

On Thursday, 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.

The Israeli military still has many options to escalate the new offensive further. In the latest operations, Israeli troops have so far not swept through Palestinian cities in Gaza, divided the enclave in two or forcibly evacuated 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.

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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.

Aric Toler, Adam Rasgon and Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting.