Tag: Conflict

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In 2016, then Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem.Credit…Pool photo by Debbie Hill

President Biden on Monday delivered a firmer message in private to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel than he has done in public, warning that he could put off growing pressure from the international community and from Congress to call on Israel to change its approach to Hamas for only so long, according to two people familiar with the call.

The private message hinted at a time limit on Mr. Biden’s ability to provide diplomatic cover for the actions of the Israeli government, as well as a new dynamic in American politics: the president presenting himself as a closer friend to Israel than it might find in Congress.

“We have a new dynamic with Congress playing the bad cop with Israel and asking the president to put a hold on an arms sales while the president plays the good cop,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Obama administration official and the director of the Middle East Security program at the Center for a New American Security. “It may give President Biden more flexibility and leverage down the line with the Israelis.”

The tactic — private pressure, combined with the president’s public support for Israel’s right to defend itself — has come under fire from Democratic members of Congress and progressive Jewish groups. But administration officials defended it on Tuesday as a product of Mr. Biden’s decades of foreign policy experience.

“He’s been doing this long enough to know that the best way to end an international conflict is typically not to debate it in public,” the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters aboard Air Force One on Tuesday.

She added: “Sometimes diplomacy needs to happen behind the scenes, it needs to be quiet and we don’t read out every component.”

Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu on Monday discussed Israel’s right to defend itself against “indiscriminate rocket attacks,” according to the White House’s public readout of the call. In the brief summary, the White House said that Mr. Biden “expressed his support for a cease-fire,” while stopping short of calling for one.

The statement, released Monday, earned Mr. Biden criticism for failing to call on Israel to change its approach despite rising international condemnation.

“While a large number of congressional Democrats and at least one senior Senate Republican have called on both Israelis and Palestinians to reach an immediate cease-fire, the Biden administration has still not publicly done so,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J-Street, a liberal pro-Israel advocacy group that has worked for years to shift the debate as a counterweight to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

“This combination of inadequate ‘quiet’ appeals for de-escalation,” he added, “and otherwise nearly unquestioning public support for and tolerance of the Netanyahu government’s actions, is unhelpful.”

VideoPalestinian citizens, activists, workers and business owners shuttered stores and downed their tools in an organized strike, and took to the streets protesting Israel’s air campaign in Gaza and other measures targeting Palestinians.CreditCredit…Jalaa Marey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel downed tools for the day on Tuesday, as did workers across the occupied West Bank and in Gaza, protesting violence against Arab Israelis, the unfolding Israeli military campaign targeting Hamas militants in Gaza and the looming eviction of several families from their homes in East Jerusalem.

Streets were deserted in Arab areas across both Israel and the occupied territories, as shopkeepers shuttered stores along the waterfront in Jaffa, central Israel; the steep roads of Umm el-Fahm, an Arab town in northern Israel; and West Bank cities such as Hebron, Jenin, Nablus and Ramallah.

Demonstrators gathered instead in central squares, waving Palestinian flags, listening to speeches and chanting against Israeli policies. Outside Ramallah, a group of Palestinians who had gathered separately from the protesters set fires on a major thoroughfare and later exchanged gunfire with Israeli soldiers, officials said.

Since hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in 1948, they have been divided not only by geography, but also by lived experience.

They were scattered across Gaza, the West Bank, and the wider Middle East, as well as the state of Israel itself. Some struggled under differing forms of military occupation, while others were given Israeli citizenship — diluting their common identity.

But on Tuesday, millions of them came together in a general strike to protest their shared treatment by Israel, in what many Palestinians described as a rare show of political unity.

An anti-Israel protest in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Tuesday. Credit…Nasser Nasser/Associated Press

Mustafa Barghouti, an independent politician who attended a rally in central Ramallah on Tuesday morning, said the protests constituted “a very significant day.”

“It reflects how Palestinians now have a unified struggle against the same system of apartheid,” he added.

Israel fiercely rejects longstanding accusations of apartheid by Palestinians, a claim now taken up by a small but growing number of rights watchdogs, including Human Rights Watch last month.

Israeli officials say that the occupation of the West Bank is a temporary measure until a peace agreement is achieved. And the blockade of Gaza, they say, is a security measure to prevent Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls Gaza and opposes Israel’s existence, from acquiring weapons. They also highlight how Arab citizens of Israel have the right to vote and elect lawmakers, have representation in Israel’s Parliament, and often rise to become judges and senior civil servants.

Mark Regev, a senior adviser to the prime minister, told The Times last month: “To allege that Israeli policies are motivated by racism is both baseless and outrageous, and belittles the very real security threats posed by Palestinian terrorists to Israeli civilians.”

But many Palestinians on either side of the boundary between Israel and the occupied territories say that they are the victims of the same system of oppression — one that operates with varying degrees of intensity, and offers Arabs varying degrees of freedom, but ultimately seeks to assert Jewish supremacy wherever that system is in force.

“We’re one big family,” said Enass Tinah, a 46-year-old researcher at the Ramallah protest. “It’s the same suffering.”

Some did not participate in the strike — including health workers in northern Israel, who felt they had a moral need to keep on working, and the Arab residents of Abu Ghosh, a town west of Jerusalem known for its good relations between Arabs and Jews.

Other Palestinians simply saw the strike as an attempt to show solidarity with Gaza, and to strengthen calls for an independent Palestinian state.

But for some, the strike, and the unity it implied, was a sign of a new era for the Palestinian cause.

For Ms. Tinah, the old hope of an independent Palestine now seemed unlikely.

A single state for Palestinians and Jews, with equal rights for both, now felt a better goal to Ms. Tinah. “That’s where we’re moving,” she said. “One state with equal rights for all citizens.”

“I don’t know what that looks like,” she said. But, she added, “I think this is the new path.”

A residential building in Gaza on Tuesday after it was bombed by Israeli warplanes.Credit…Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

Fighting between Israel and Hamas extended into a ninth day on Tuesday but subtle signs emerged that the sides were privately edging toward a cease-fire, according to three people involved in the negotiations.

The indications came as a growing chorus of international parties called on Israel, Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza to lay down their weapons.

For the first time, President Biden expressed support for a cease-fire on Monday, but he also reiterated that Israel had a right to defend itself, stopping short of publicly calling on Israel to change its approach.

A person working on the cease-fire talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations are politically delicate, said Egypt and the United Nations were working together to “restore calm.”

A senior Hamas official based in Qatar, Moussa Abu Marzouk, said Qatar was also involved in the effort.

A senior Israeli government official, who is privy to cease-fire talks and also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Israel was not ready for a cease-fire yet, but acknowledged that it might be soon.

Mr. Abu Marzouk said Hamas was ready for a cease-fire with Israel. But he said the Israeli government was demanding Hamas unilaterally halt its fire for two to three hours before Israel decides whether it will do the same — a position he described as “stubborn.”

“We agreed to an end to the war in a simultaneous and mutual way,” he said.

But he hinted that a new escalation was possible if Israel moved forward with the evictions of several Palestinian families in East Jerusalem or acted violently against Palestinians at the Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, two issues that played a role in the buildup to the current fighting.

The Israeli official cautioned against what he called a premature cease-fire, contending that Hamas would take advantage of such an arrangement by regrouping and attacking Israel anew. The official said Israel was seeking what he described as a sustained period of peace and calm.

Israeli soldiers firing toward the Gaza Strip on Tuesday from a position along the border. Credit…Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BRUSSELS — European Union foreign ministers overwhelmingly called for an immediate cease-fire to stop fighting between Israel and the Palestinians in an emergency meeting on Tuesday.

All of the member states except Hungary backed a statement that also condemns Hamas’s rocket attacks on Israel, supports Israel’s right to self-defense but cautions that it “has to be done in a proportional manner and respecting international humanitarian law,” said the E.U.’s top foreign policy official, Josep Borrell Fontelles.

He said that the number of civilian casualties in Gaza, “including a high number of women and children,” was “unacceptable.” And he said that the European Union, as part of the quartet with the United States, Russia and the United Nations that seeks peace in the Middle East, would push to relaunch a serious diplomatic process.

“The priority is the immediate cessation of all violence and the implementation of a cease-fire,” Mr. Borrell said.

Foreign policy in the European Union works by unanimity, so Mr. Borrell’s comments were an effort, he said, “to reflect the overall agreement.”

In terms of impact, a few individual European nations tend to carry more weight with Israel. In general, European governments have been supportive of Israel and its right to self-defense against barrages of rockets aimed at Israeli civilians.

Still, as the fighting has gone on, key European countries are pressing for a quick cease-fire, including Germany, which is traditionally a strong backer of Israel.

On Monday, after speaking with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany “again sharply condemned the continued rocket attacks from Gaza on Israel and assured the prime minister of the German government’s solidarity,” said her spokesman, Steffen Seibert. “She reaffirmed Israel’s right to defend itself against the attacks,” he said.

But given the many civilian lives lost “on both sides,” Mr. Seibert said, “the chancellor expressed her hope that the fighting will end as soon as possible.”

On Tuesday, after Ms. Merkel had spoken with Jordan’s King Abdullah, “Both agreed that initiatives for a speedy cease-fire should be supported in order to create the conditions for the resumption of political negotiations,” Mr. Seibert said.

Before the E.U. meeting, the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, said that “right now, ending the violence in the Middle East is the first priority. But we also need to talk about how to avoid such an escalation in the future.”

Mr. Maas added that the European Union “has a role to play here,” both in terms of political and humanitarian action. Germany has pledged 40 million euros for humanitarian aid for Gazans.

The Germans, like the British, have also seen a number of demonstrations against Israel’s military actions, a few of them openly anti-Semitic. France, the only E.U. member of the United Nations Security Council, has also pressed for a quick cease-fire.

On Monday, President Emmanuel Macron of France told a news conference that “there needs to be a process for a cease-fire as quickly as possible and construction of a possible path to discussions between the different protagonists.”

Mr. Macron said he was having discussions with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt and the king of Jordan “to be able together to see how we make a concrete proposal.” It is “absolutely necessary” to end hostilities, he said.

Palestinian families taking shelter in a United Nations school in Rafah, southern Gaza, on Monday.Credit…Said Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Until Monday evening, the Al-Rimal health clinic in central Gaza City was a key cog in the Palestinian health system. Its eight doctors and 200 nurses administered hundreds of vaccinations, prescriptions, and screenings a day. And Al-Rimal housed the only laboratory in Gaza that could process coronavirus tests.

But then, on Monday night, an Israeli airstrike hit the street outside, sending shrapnel into the clinic, shattering windows, shredding doors, furniture and computers — and wrecking Gaza’s only coronavirus test laboratory.

“During times of war people need more treatment than usual,” Mohammed Abu Samaan, a senior administrator at the clinic, said Tuesday. “Now we can’t give people medicine.”

The wreckage at Al-Rimal is one of the most striking examples of devastation wrought by the nine-day-old battle between Hamas militants and the Israeli military — creating a humanitarian catastrophe that is touching nearly every civilian living in Gaza, a coastal territory of about two million people.

Sewage systems have been destroyed, sending fetid wastewater into the streets of Gaza City. A critical desalination plant that helped provide fresh water to 250,000 people is offline, and water pipes serving at least 800,000 people have been damaged. Landfills are closed, with trash piling up. And dozens of schools have been either damaged or ordered to close, forcing some 600,000 students to miss classes on Monday.

The level of destruction and loss of human life have underlined the challenge in the Gaza Strip, already overpacked with people and suffering under the weight of an indefinite blockade by Israel and Egypt even before the latest conflict.

President Biden added his voice to the growing chorus of international leaders calling for a cease-fire on Monday night, but there was little indication that an end to the hostilities was near on Tuesday morning.

Militants in Gaza aimed a barrage of around 100 rockets at southern Israel overnight, adding to the more than 3,300 fired in just over a week. And the Israeli bombardment showed no signs of letting up, with the sound of explosions once again rocking Gaza before dawn.

General Hidai Zilberman, a military spokesman, who spoke to the Israeli network Army Radio, said there was no plan to suspend operations.

“We have a bank of targets that is full, and we want to continue and to create pressure on Hamas,” he said. “This morning, the chief of staff gave us the plans for the next 24 hours, the targets. We will hit anyone who belongs to Hamas, from the first to the last.”

A building in Ashdod, southern Israel, on Monday, after a strike by a rocket from Gaza.Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

Hamas said it would not stop its assault, accusing “the criminal Zionist enemy” of “bombing of homes and residential apartments.”

“We warn the enemy that if it did not stop that immediately, we would resume rocketing Tel Aviv,” the militant group’s spokesman Abu Ubaida said, according to Reuters.

While Hamas fighters move through an extensive series of tunnels under Gaza, and as Israeli warplanes drop bombs aimed at destroying that network, it is the people caught between who suffer the most calamitous losses.

Schools in southern Israel within range of the rocket fire have been closed and many families have left the border areas. The constant wailing of sirens warning of incoming rocket fire punctuate daily life, particularly in the south, sending Israelis repeatedly running to shelters.

At least 10 people in Israel have been killed in rocket attacks, the Israeli authorities said.

The death toll in Gaza itself has surpassed 200, including at least 61 children, according to the health authorities in the territory.

And the sprawling humanitarian crisis in Gaza — documented by both United Nations agencies and the local authorities — is growing by the day, adding to pressure on political leaders to pause the hostilities so that relief can reach those in desperate need.

Palestinian activists across Israel took part in a general strike on Tuesday to protest Israel’s air campaign in Gaza and other measures targeting Palestinians.

Even before the current conflict, Gaza was facing an economic crisis and political crisis.

Hamas won elections in the territory in 2006 and took full control in 2007, after which Israel put a blockade on the region, citing the need to curb weapons smuggling. Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza, also put in restrictions that tightly control the movement of people and goods in and out of the territory.

Since 2007, Hamas has engaged in three major conflicts with Israel and several smaller skirmishes. After each eruption of violence, Gaza’s infrastructure was left in shambles.

The result, according to a report last year by the United Nations, is that Gaza has “the world’s highest unemployment rate, and more than half of its population lives below the poverty line.”

The latest round of fighting has crippled that fragile infrastructure.

Six hospitals and eight clinics have suffered bomb damage, according to the United Nations’ humanitarian affairs office, limiting medical treatment available for many people living in the region.

By Monday, Israeli bombs had destroyed 132 residential buildings and damaged 316 housing units so badly that they were uninhabitable, according to Gaza’s housing ministry.

More than 40,000 people have been forced into shelters and thousands more have sought refuge with friends or relatives, according to the U.N. humanitarian affairs office.

“Until a cease-fire is reached, all parties must agree to a ‘humanitarian pause,’” the office said in a statement. “These measures would allow humanitarian agencies to carry out relief operations, and people to purchase food and water and seek medical care.”

Smoke rising from the site of an Israeli bombing in Gaza City on Tuesday morning.Credit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

The worst Israeli-Palestinian fighting in years spilled into a ninth day on Tuesday as the Israeli military bombarded Gaza and southern Lebanon and Hamas militants fired rockets into southern Israeli towns, hours after President Biden expressed support for a cease-fire during a call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

Mr. Biden’s carefully worded statement fell short of an immediate demand for an end to Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza, which showed little sign of ending after Mr. Netanyahu said on Monday that his country’s armed forces would “continue striking at the terrorist targets.”

Despite growing concern in foreign capitals over the violence — and among some of Israel’s staunchest defenders in Washington — the region’s heaviest clashes since a 2014 war threatened to escalate. Late Monday, the Israeli military fired artillery shells into Lebanon for the first time since the hostilities began, striking what it said were Palestinian militants who had attempted to fire rockets into Israel.

The Israeli Army said it believed that a small Palestinian faction in Lebanon — and not the militant group Hezbollah — had fired the rockets, most of which failed to reach Israeli territory. The United Nations peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon tweeted that it had intensified patrols in the area and that the situation on Tuesday morning was calm.

But the toll on civilians continued to grow. By late Monday, the Israeli bombardment had killed 212 people in Gaza, including dozens of children, and Hamas rockets had killed at least 10 in Israel.

The Israeli Army said that Hamas had fired almost as many rockets in eight days — 3,350 — as it did in the 50-day war the two sides fought in 2014. About 90 percent of them were destroyed in midair by the Iron Dome, an antimissile defense system partly financed by the United States, the Israeli Army said.

The fighting has been focused on the Gaza Strip, the crowded coastal enclave ruled by Hamas, as the Israeli Army bombards infrastructure and underground tunnels that it says Hamas uses to support its military operations. But protests and violence have also erupted in the West Bank and Israel, where Arabs have clashed with the Israeli police and Jewish residents.

The Biden administration has stepped up its diplomatic engagement, dispatching an envoy to the region last week. In a readout of Mr. Biden’s call with Mr. Netanyahu, White House officials said the president had “expressed his support for a cease-fire and discussed U.S. engagement with Egypt and other partners towards that end.” But Mr. Biden had “reiterated his firm support for Israel’s right to defend itself against indiscriminate rocket attacks,” the statement added.

The Biden administration previously avoided the use of the term “cease-fire,” with top officials like Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken talking instead about the need for a “sustainable calm” and others referring to the need for “restraint.”

Strikes damaged buildings including one that housed the health authorities in Gaza City on Monday.Credit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

Since Covid-19 first emerged in the blockaded Gaza Strip, a shortage of medical supplies has allowed authorities to administer only a relatively tiny number of coronavirus tests.

Now, the sole laboratory in Gaza that processes test results has become temporarily inoperable after an Israeli airstrike nearby on Monday, officials in Gaza said.

The strike, which targeted a separate building in Gaza City, sent shrapnel and debris flying across the street, damaging the lab and the administrative offices of the Hamas-run Health Ministry, said Dr. Majdi Dhair, director of the ministry’s preventive medicine department.

One ministry employee was hospitalized and in serious condition after shrapnel struck him in the head, Dr. Dhair said in a phone interview on Tuesday.

“This attack was barbaric,” he said. “There’s no way to justify it.”

The Israeli Army did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the strike. Since Israel began its bombing campaign in Gaza on May 10, the army has said that its airstrikes aim solely at militants and their infrastructure.

Dr. Dhair said that he believed the equipment inside the lab was unharmed but emphasized that it would take at least a day to clean up the damage and prepare it to process coronavirus tests again. In the meantime, he said, medical teams would stop administering tests.

Rami Abadla, the director of the Gaza ministry’s infection control department, said that the lab would also be temporarily unable to process results for other tests related to H.I.V., hepatitis C and other conditions.

Over the past week, the authorities in Gaza have tested an average of 515 Palestinians daily for the virus. Only 1.9 percent of Gaza’s two million people were fully vaccinated as of Monday, according to official data, compared with 56 percent in Israel.

After a surge in cases in April, blamed mostly on the highly transmissible coronavirus variant first identified in Britain, new infections in Gaza had recently fallen to a manageable level, health experts said. But with Israeli airstrikes destroying buildings, causing widespread damage and leaving more than 200 people dead as of Monday, United Nations officials have warned that coronavirus cases could rise again.

Unvaccinated Palestinians were crowding into schools run by the United Nations relief agency in Gaza, turning them into de facto bomb shelters. Matthias Schmale, the U.N. agency’s director of operations, said last week that those schools “could turn into mass spreaders.”

Mr. Schmale and the top World Health Organization official in Gaza, Sacha Bootsma, also said that all vaccinations had stopped when hostilities broke out, and that any vaccine supplies headed to the territory had been delayed by the closure of Gaza’s border crossings.

Surveying damage in Gaza on Monday after Israeli bombardments.Credit…Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

The United Nations Security Council held its fourth meeting in a week on Tuesday over efforts to devise a common statement condemning the deadly force used by Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza.

It was not immediately clear whether the council’s 15 members, who were meeting privately, would be able to overcome objections to any common statement from the United States, Israel’s most powerful ally.

Top United Nations officials have said the absence of a singular message from the Security Council demanding a halt to the fighting has not been helpful. “A strong unified voice, we believe, will carry weight,” the United Nations spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, told reporters on Tuesday.

Frustrated by what they see as U.S. intransigence even as the deaths and devastation — overwhelmingly Palestinian — extended into a second week, the representatives of China, Norway and Tunisia put the subject on the agenda for the Tuesday meeting.

Any statement from the Security Council requires all members to approve it. The United States has been the only holdout, irritating even some of America’s closest allies on the council.

“Conflict is raging, resulting in utterly devastating humanitarian impact,” the ambassador of Ireland, Geraldine Byrne Nason, told the council, according to a statement released by Ireland’s U.N. mission. “The Security Council has yet to utter a single word publicly.”

She said “it is high time the Council steps up, breaks its silence and speaks out.”

European Union foreign ministers, who also met on Tuesday to discuss the conflict, overwhelmingly called for a cease-fire. All 27 members except Hungary backed the demand. At the Security Council’s third meeting, on Sunday, the E.U. representative’s statement could not be made on behalf of member states because Hungary, strongly pro-Israel, objected.

Other European member states, such as Austria, Bulgaria and Romania, are similarly steadfast in supporting Israel, while countries like Belgium, Luxembourg and Sweden are more critical of Israeli military responses and expansion of settlements in occupied territory.

But President Biden’s call on Monday for a cease-fire, even without using the word “immediate,” is likely to be followed by other Western nations.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has previously defended American reluctance to join other Security Council members in a statement, arguing that it would not be helpful while intense but private diplomatic efforts are underway to persuade Israel and Hamas to stop fighting.

Diplomats from the United States, Egypt and Qatar, as well as the special U.N. coordinator for Middle East peace, have all been enmeshed in the efforts. The United States is prohibited from talking directly to Hamas, which is listed as a terrorist organization under American law, so Egypt and Qatar are acting as intermediaries for both Israel and the United States.

But neither Israel nor Hamas has shown any indication that they are ready for an immediate truce. At the same time, the Israeli military’s continual bombings and shelling in Gaza, which have killed at least 212 Palestinians there, according to the health authorities in the territory, have stunned much of the world, threatening to further isolate the Israelis and their American defenders.

The president of the United Nations General Assembly, Volkan Bozkir of Turkey, scheduled that body’s own meeting over the Israel-Hamas conflict on Thursday. While that meeting may have no practical impact on events on the ground, a majority of the 193 members of the United Nations are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and highly critical of Israel’s occupation of lands seized in the 1967 war. That gathering could therefore be the biggest stage yet for international condemnation of Israel’s actions.

In another sign of growing exasperation with Israel, King Abdullah of Jordan blamed the escalating violence on what he described as Israeli provocations. In a Twitter post on Monday from the royal Jordanian court, the king said that he had conveyed his view in a phone call with António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general.

King Abdullah’s statements carry weight because his country signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, and Jordan is the custodian of the religious site in Jerusalem that houses Al Aqsa, the mosque where tensions between Palestinians and Israelis played an early role in the latest upsurge of violence.

Smoke billowing from a Lebanese border village on Tuesday, after overnight Israeli shelling. The Israeli military said the strikes were in response to militants’ efforts to fire rockets into Israel.Credit…Jalaa Marey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

As the seeming intractability of the latest Israel-Gaza conflict provoked concern around the world on Tuesday, the ninth day of fighting was marked by a worrying development: It spilled over into Southern Lebanon for the first time.

The Israeli military said it had launched artillery shells into Lebanon in response to Palestinian militants’ trying to fire rockets into Israel. Fears of the conflict spreading were offset by the fact that the Israeli Army said that it believed the rockets had come from a small Palestinian faction in Lebanon — and not from Hezbollah, the militant group sponsored by Iran.

Amid growing concern in foreign capitals over the violence — and among some of Israel’s staunchest defenders in Washington — the region’s heaviest clashes since a 2014 war threatened to escalate. The death toll in Gaza has already surpassed 200, including dozens of children. In Israel, at least 10 people have been killed in rocket attacks.

As the casualties mount, along with the suffering of those Palestinians and Israelis left behind, several attacks stand out as seminal moments in a conflict that has transformed with surprising velocity, polarizing Israeli society and spurring mob violence on both sides.

Here is what is driving the conflict, and its arc so far:

• In the bombardment before dawn on Monday, the Israeli Army said that 54 warplanes used 110 rockets and bombs as they attacked around 35 targets for a period of 20 minutes. Much of the assault was aimed at a network of underground tunnels used by Hamas to move people and equipment. Israeli strategists refer to this strategy of targeting the tunnels as “mowing the grass.” Airstrikes also targeted the homes of Hamas’s military leaders, the Israeli military said.

• An Israeli airstrike over the weekend at a refugee camp killed at least 10 Palestinians, including eight children. Mohammed al-Hadidi said that his wife and their sons Suhaib, 14; Yahya, 11; Abdelrahman, 8; and Wissam, 5, were killed, as were his wife’s brother’s four children and her sister-in-law. Only a 5-month-old baby boy, Omar, was pulled from the rubble alive. The attack magnified growing criticism against Israel’s military for the number of children killed in airstrikes on Gaza. Outrage has been fanned on social media where images of children’s bodies have circulated.

• On Saturday, an Israeli airstrike destroyed the 12-story Jalaa tower in Gaza City that housed some of the world’s leading media organizations, including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The destruction of the building drew global criticism that Israel was undermining press freedom. On Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces tweeted that the building was “an important base of operations” for Hamas military intelligence. But The A.P. said it had operated from the building for 15 years and had no indication that Hamas was installed there. There were no casualties.

The Jalaa tower in Gaza City was hit by an Israeli airstrike on Saturday. Credit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

• A 5-year-old Israeli boy, Ido Avigal, was killed on Wednesday when a rocket fired from Gaza made a direct hit on the building next door to his aunt’s apartment, where he was visiting with his mother and older sister. He had been sheltering in a fortified safe room. More than 3,300 rockets have been fired at Israel from Gaza this week, the Israeli authorities have said.

• The conflict began last Monday when weeks of simmering tensions in Jerusalem between Palestinian protesters, the police and right-wing Israelis escalated, against the backdrop of a longstanding local battle for control of a city sacred to Jews, Arabs and Christians. Among the main catalysts was a raid by the Israeli police on the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites, in which hundreds of Palestinians and a score of police officers were wounded. Militants in Gaza responded by lobbing rockets at Jerusalem, spurring Israel to respond with airstrikes.

• The root of the latest escalation was intense disputes over East Jerusalem. The Israeli police prevented Palestinians from gathering near one of the city’s ancient gates during the holy month of Ramadan, as they had customarily. At the same time, Palestinians faced eviction by Jewish landlords from homes in East Jerusalem. Many Arabs called it part of a wider Israeli campaign to force Palestinians out of the city, describing it as ethnic cleansing.

• Intense political struggles for leadership of Israel and the Palestinians are part of the backdrop for the fighting. After four inconclusive elections in Israel in two years, no one has been able to form a governing coalition. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on trial on corruption charges, has been able to remain in office, and hopes Israelis will rally around him in the crisis. In Palestinian elections that were recently postponed, Hamas hoped to take control of the Palestinian Authority, and has positioned itself as the defender of Jerusalem.

1. Israel’s Iron Dome system intercepting rockets launched from GazaAnas Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
2. Streaks through the sky left by the Iron Dome systemFatima Shbair/Getty Images
3. Ashkelon, IsraelNir Elias/Reuters
4. Ashdod, IsraelMenahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
5. Sderot, IsraelJack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
6. Ashkelon, IsraelJack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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As the worst violence in years rages between the Israeli military and Hamas, each night the sky is lit up by a barrage of missiles and the projectiles designed to counter them.

It is a display of fire and thunder that has been described as both remarkable and horrifying.

The images of Israel’s Iron Dome defense system attempting to shoot down missiles fired by militants in Gaza have been among the most widely shared online, even as the toll wrought by the violence only becomes clear in the light of the next day’s dawn.

“The number of Israelis killed and wounded would be far higher if it had not been for the Iron Dome system, which has been a lifesaver as it always is,” Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, said this week.

The Iron Dome became operational in 2011 and got its biggest first test over eight days in November 2014, when Gaza militants fired some 1,500 rockets aimed at Israel.

While Israeli officials claimed a success rate of up to 90 percent during that conflict, outside experts were skeptical.

The system’s interceptors — just 6 inches wide and 10 feet long — rely on miniature sensors and computerized brains to zero in on short-range rockets. Israel’s larger interceptors — the Patriot and Arrow systems — can fly longer distances to go after bigger threats.

The Iron Dome was recently upgraded, but the details of the changes were not made public.

It is being tested like never before, according to the Israeli military.

“I think it will not be a big mistake to say that even last night there were more missiles than all the missiles fired on Tel Aviv in 2014,” Major General Ori Gordin, commander of Israel’s home front, said during a news conference on Sunday. “Hamas’s attack is very intense in terms of pace of firing.”

Militants in the Gaza Strip have about 3,100 missiles, the Israeli Air Force said on Sunday, noting that about 1,150 of them had been intercepted.

“Despite the layers of defense, there is never 100 percent defense,” Gen. Gordin said. “Sometimes the aerial defense will miss or not be able to intercept, and sometimes people will not get into shelters or lay on the ground and sometimes a whole building will collapse.”

Protestors marched in Los Angeles, demonstrating in support of Palestine, Saturday.Credit…Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

It used to be that when Palestinians were under fire, protests would follow in the streets of Arab cities. But solidarity with the Palestinians has shifted online and gone global, creating a virtual Arab street that has the potential to have a wider impact than the physical ones in the Middle East.

A profusion of pro-Palestinian voices, memes and videos on social media has bypassed traditional media and helped accomplish what decades of Arab protest, boycotts of Israel and regular spurts of violence had not: yanking the Palestinian cause, all but left for dead a few months ago, toward the mainstream.

As Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza stretches into a second week, the online protesters have linked arms with popular movements for minority rights such as Black Lives Matter, seeking to reclaim the narrative from the mainstream media and picking up support in Western countries that have reflexively supported Israel during past conflicts with Palestinians.

“It feels different this time, it definitely does,” said Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, 29, the Palestinian-Jordanian-American founder of MuslimGirl.com, whose posts on the topic have been ubiquitous over the past week. “I wasn’t expecting this to happen so quickly, and for the wave to shift this fast. You don’t see many people out on the streets in protest these days, but I would say that social media is the mass protest.”

Palestinian activists say that they aim to seize control of the narrative from media outlets that have suppressed their point of view and falsely equated Israel’s suffering with that of its occupied territories.

They refer to Israeli policies as “the colonization of Palestine,” describe its discrimination against Palestinians as apartheid and characterize the proposed eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem, which helped set off the current conflict, as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing

As images of Sheikh Jarrah, destruction in Gaza and police raids on Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem have barreled from Palestinian online platforms — including PaliRoots and Eye on Palestine — across Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, they have united a new generation of Arab activists with progressive allies who might not have known where Gaza was two weeks ago.

Representative Gregory Meeks, Democrat of New York and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, during a hearing in March.Credit…Pool photo by Ken Cedeno

President Biden’s urging of a halt to Israeli-Palestinian fighting followed calls from Democratic lawmakers for his administration to speak out firmly against the escalation of violence. But unlike during past clashes in the region — when most Democrats have called for peace without openly criticizing Israel’s actions — skepticism around Israel’s current campaign in Gaza has spread to even some of its strongest defenders in Congress.

They include Representative Gregory W. Meeks, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, who told Democrats on the panel on Monday that he would ask the Biden administration to delay a $735 million tranche of precision-guided weapons to Israel that had been approved before tensions in the Middle East boiled over.

Mr. Meeks is a fixture at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, the most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. His call to delay the arms package came after a number of Democrats raised concerns about sending American-made weapons to Israel at a time when it has bombed civilians, as well as a building that housed press outlets.

A day earlier, 28 Democratic senators put out a letter publicly calling for a cease-fire. The effort was led by Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia and, at 34, the face of a younger generation of American Jews in Congress.

On Saturday, Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who is known as one of Israel’s most unshakable allies in the Democratic Party, issued a statement saying he was “deeply troubled” by Israeli strikes that had killed Palestinian civilians and the tower housing media outlets. He demanded that both sides “uphold the rules and laws of war” and find a peaceful end to fighting that has killed more than 200 Palestinians and 10 Israelis.

Though they have no intention of ending the United States’ close alliance with Israel, a growing number of Democrats in Washington say they are no longer willing to give the country a pass for its harsh treatment of the Palestinians. Those most vocal in their criticism of the Israeli government said they meant to send a message to Mr. Biden: that the old playbook he used as a senator and as vice president would no longer find the same support in his party.

“That hasn’t worked,” Representative Mark Pocan, a progressive Democrat from Wisconsin, told a top adviser to Mr. Biden late last week, he said in an interview on Monday. “We’re going to be advocating for peace in a way that maybe they haven’t traditionally heard.”

The strongest push is coming from the energized progressive wing of the party, whose representatives in the House, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, have in recent days accused Israel of gross human rights violations against Palestinians.

Republicans and AIPAC have been swift to warn against any perceived weakening of the U.S. commitment to Israel. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader and a vocal supporter of Israel, condemned Ms. Ocasio-Cortez on Monday for her description of Israel as an “apartheid state” and urged the president to “leave no doubt where America stands.”

The Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem.Credit…Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Our Jerusalem bureau chief, Patrick Kingsley, examined the events that have led to the past week’s violence, the worst between Israelis and Palestinians in years. A little-noticed police action in Jerusalem was among them. He writes:

Twenty-seven days before the first rocket was fired from Gaza this week, a squad of Israeli police officers entered the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, brushed the Palestinian attendants aside and strode across its vast limestone courtyard. Then they cut the cables to the loudspeakers that broadcast prayers to the faithful from four medieval minarets.

It was the night of April 13, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It was also Memorial Day in Israel, which honors those who died fighting for the country. The Israeli president was delivering a speech at the Western Wall, a sacred Jewish site that lies below the mosque, and Israeli officials were concerned that the prayers would drown it out.

Here is his full account of that night and the events that later unfolded.

Here’s what you need to know:

Israeli warplanes targeted Gaza City on Monday morning.Credit…Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Israeli warplanes unleashed a fierce air bombardment on Gaza City before dawn on Monday as Hamas militants in the coastal enclave continued to target towns in southern Israel with barrages of rockets, bringing the conflict into a second, grinding week of bloodshed and destruction.

Stepped-up diplomatic efforts led by the United States and a meeting of the United Nations Security Council over the weekend showed little sign of progress. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, speaking on Sunday, said the operation would “take time.”

“We’ll do whatever it takes to restore order and quiet,” Mr. Netanyahu said during a television appearance.

The overnight bombardment came after the deadliest day of the conflict, which included a strike in Gaza City that left three buildings flattened and killed at least 42 people.

The Israeli military said it had been targeting the warren of tunnels used by militants that runs beneath the city and that when the tunnels collapsed, the buildings came tumbling down as well.

Among the dead, yet again, were children. At least 10 in this location. In the past week, of the nearly 200 Palestinians who have died, nearly half have been women and children, sparking condemnation across the world and helping to fan protests, which have taken place in recent days from London to Baghdad to Berlin.

Regional conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians have periodically become conflated with tensions among Europe’s sometimes polarized communities, particularly in countries like France with large Muslim and Jewish communities. Concerns were growing that anger against Israel was boiling over into anti-Semitic violence.

But even under sustained military bombardment, Hamas militants based in Gaza continued to unleash a barrage of missiles into southern Israel — more than 3,100 since the start of the conflict a week ago, according to the Israeli military.

Many of the rockets were intercepted yet again by the Israeli defense system known as the Iron Dome.

Overnight Monday — like every night for the past week — two battles were waged: one in the skies above and another in the tunnels below Gaza.

Israeli experts often describe periodic campaigns as “mowing the grass,” with the aim of curbing rocket fire, destroying as much of the militant groups’ infrastructure as possible and restoring deterrence. Critics say the use of such terminology is dehumanizing to Palestinians and tends to minimize the toll on civilians as well as militants.

The Israeli army said 54 Israeli warplanes took part in the attack using 110 rockets and bombs as they attacked around 35 targets for a period of 20 minutes.

Much of the assault was directed at a network of underground tunnels used by Hamas to move people and equipment — a subterranean transit system that the Israel military refers to as “the metro.”

During the operation, the army said, a tunnel route around 50 feet long was destroyed. Warplanes also targeted the homes of Hamas’s military leaders, the Israeli military said. At least some of those strikes landed near a row of hotels in a built-up area of Gaza City, forcing some guests into a bomb shelter.

On Sunday evening, the general in charge of Israel’s Southern Command, Eliezer Toledano, told the public broadcaster Kan, “It is important we continue to exhaust the campaign that we have entered and deepen the damage being caused to Hamas.”

At least 11 Israeli residents had been killed by some of the thousands of rockets fired from Gaza, the region controlled by Hamas.

Representatives of the United States, Qatar, Egypt and other countries have been trying to broker a cease-fire. In comments to France 24, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt urged “a return to calm” and an end to the “violence” and “killing.”

So far, their efforts have not succeeded. “If it doesn’t want to stop, we won’t stop,” Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas official, told Al Jazeera.

Some American officials are urging Israel to halt its operations soon or risk losing ground in the international court of public opinion. Late on Sunday, Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat from Georgia, and 27 other senators called for an immediate cease-fire “to prevent further loss of life.”

Short of a lasting cease-fire, the Biden administration is trying to negotiate a humanitarian pause in the fighting to help Palestinians who have been forced from their homes in Gaza. Similar efforts in the past have been a key first step toward winding down hostilities.

VideoIsraeli warplanes unleashed an air bombardment on Gaza City before dawn on Monday, bringing the conflict into the second week of bloodshed and destruction.CreditCredit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

As Israelis and Palestinians hunkered down for the second week of an increasingly stubborn conflict, a series of deadly flash points have galvanized both sides in a region where the human cost of war is all too familiar.

Before dawn on Monday, Israeli warplanes bombarded Gaza City, compounding the civilian suffering in the coastal enclave. At the same time, the rocket barrage by Hamas militants continued to take its toll on Israeli cities, including in Tel Aviv, the commercial center of the country, where the bubble of peacetime has been radically punctured.

As the casualties mount, along with the suffering of those Palestinians and Israelis left behind, several attacks stand out as seminal moments in a conflict that has transformed with surprising velocity, polarizing Israeli society like seldom before and spurring mob violence on both sides that has fanned fears of civil war.

Here are a few of the major flash points:

• In the bombardment before dawn on Monday, the Israeli army said 54 Israeli warplanes used 110 rockets and bombs as they attacked around 35 targets for a period of 20 minutes. Much of the assault was aimed at a network of underground tunnels used by Hamas to move people and equipment — a subterranean transit system that the Israel military refers to as “the metro.” Israeli strategists refer to this strategy of targeting the tunnels as “mowing the grass.” Warplanes also targeted the homes of Hamas’s military leaders, the Israeli military said.

• An Israeli airstrike over the weekend at a refugee camp killed at least 10 Palestinians, including eight children. Mohammed al-Hadidi said his wife and their sons Suhaib, 14, Yahya, 11, Abdelrahman, 8, and Wissam, 5, were killed, as were her brother’s four children and her sister-in-law. Only a 5-month-old baby boy, Omar, was pulled from the rubble alive. The attack magnified growing criticism against Israel’s military for the number of children that have been killed in airstrikes on Gaza. Outrage has been fanned on social media where images of children’s bodies have circulated, along with the video of a wailing infant being comforted by his father.

• On Saturday, an Israeli airstrike destroyed a well-known 12-story building in Gaza City that housed some of the world’s leading media organizations including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The destruction of the al-Jalaa tower drew global criticism that Israel was undermining press freedom. On Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces tweeted that the building was “an important base of operations” for Hamas military intelligence. But The A.P. said it had operated from the building for 15 years and had no indication that Hamas was operating there. There were no casualties.

The al-Jalaa tower was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike on Saturday. Credit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

• A 5-year-old Israeli boy, Ido Avigal, was killed on Wednesday when a rocket fired from Gaza made a direct hit on the building next door to his aunt’s apartment, where he was visiting with his mother and older sister. He had been sheltering in a fortified safe room. Nearly 3,000 rockets have been fired at Israel from Gaza this week.

• The conflict began last Monday when weeks of simmering tensions in Jerusalem between Palestinian protesters, the police and right-wing Israelis escalated, against the backdrop of a longstanding local battle for control of a city sacred to Jews, Arabs and Christians. Among the main catalysts was a raid by the Israeli police on the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites, in which hundreds of Palestinians and a score of police officers were wounded. Militants in Gaza responded by lobbing rockets at Jerusalem, spurring Israel to respond with airstrikes.

• The root of the latest escalation was intense disputes over East Jerusalem. Israeli police prevented Palestinians from gathering near one of the city’s ancient gates during the holy month of Ramadan, as they had customarily. At the same time, Palestinians faced eviction by Jewish landlords from homes in East Jerusalem. Many Arabs called it part of a wider Israeli campaign to force Palestinians out of the city, describing it as ethnic cleansing.

• Intense political struggles for leadership of Israel and the Palestinians are part of the backdrop for the fighting. After four inconclusive elections in Israel in two years, no one has been able to form a governing coalition. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on trial on corruption charges, has been able to remain in office, and hopes Israelis will rally around him in the crisis. In Palestinian elections that were recently postponed, Hamas hoped to take control of the Palestinian Authority, and has positioned itself as the defender of Jerusalem.

Troops during an exercise by Hamas and other Palestinian factions in Gaza City in December.Credit…Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

When it comes it Hamas’s military capabilities, much of the focus has been on the labyrinthine tunnels it uses to launch attacks against Israel or the arsenal of missiles it aims at Israeli cities.

But Israeli military experts and officials say there is another lesser discussed and murky threat: clandestine naval commandoes entering or hitting Israel by sea.

It sounds like a scene from a Cold War thriller: An undercover commando unit infiltrating a country with underwater shuttles in order to target an energy facility or a populated settlement.

But that was precisely the goal, according to the Israeli military, of a naval unit being directed by Hamas.

“Over the last days, Israeli naval troops spotted suspicious activity in the Northern Gaza Strip, nearby assets of the Hamas naval forces, and tracked the movements of a number of suspect enemy combatants,” the Israeli defense forces said in a statement.

They military said that the suspects were moving a “Hamas submergible naval weapon” that “appeared to be on its way to carry out a terror attack in Israeli waters.”

The military released a video showing Israeli defense forces destroying the vessel early Monday.

Shaul Chorev, a retired Israeli admiral who is Head of Haifa University’s Maritime Policy and Strategy Research Center, said Israel in recent years has been increasingly concerned about Hamas’s naval commando units. He said that undercover and surprise sea attacks were one way the militant group had sought to overcome Israel’s asymmetric military capability, including its mighty air force and Golden Dome defense system used to shoot down rockets fired by militants in Gaza.

“The fear is that these commando units can be used to target infrastructure like power stations or to try and infiltrate Israel by sea,” he said.

He said Israelis still shuddered at the memory of an episode in July 2014, during Israel’s invasion of Gaza, when four Hamas operatives armed with automatic weapons, explosives and grenades, surreptitiously swam ashore near Kibbutz Zikim, on Israel’s southern coast, and tried to target an Israeli tank before being killed.

1. Hosam Salem for The New York Times
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In the deadliest attack of the current conflict so far, Israeli airstrikes on buildings in Gaza City on Sunday killed at least 42 people, including 10 children, Palestinian officials said.

In a statement, the Israeli military said it had “struck an underground military structure belonging to the Hamas terrorist organization which was located under the road.” It added: “Hamas intentionally locates its terrorist infrastructure under civilian houses, exposing them to danger. The underground foundations collapsed, causing the civilian housing above them to collapse, causing unintended casualties.”

Israeli airstrikes and artillery barrages on Gaza, an impoverished and densely packed enclave of two million people, have killed at least 198 Palestinians, including 35 women and 58 children, between last Monday and Sunday evening, producing stark images of destruction that have reverberated around the world.

Searching for survivors on Sunday after an overnight air strike in Gaza City.Credit…Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

Civilians are paying an especially high price in the latest bout of violence between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, raising urgent questions about how the laws of war apply to the conflagration: which military actions are legal, what war crimes are being committed and who, if anyone, will ever be held to account.

Both sides appear to be violating those laws, experts said: Hamas has fired nearly 3,000 rockets toward Israeli cities and towns, a clear war crime. And Israel, although it says it takes measures to avoid civilian casualties, has subjected Gaza to such an intense bombardment, killing families and flattening buildings, that it probably constitutes a disproportionate use of force — also a crime.

No legal adjudication is possible in the heat of battle. But Israeli airstrikes and artillery barrages on Gaza, an impoverished and densely packed enclave of two million people, killed at least 198 Palestinians, including 93 women and children, between last Monday and Sunday evening, according to Palestinian authorities, producing stark images of destruction that have reverberated around the world.

In the other direction, Hamas missiles have rained over Israeli towns and cities, sowing fear and killing at least ten people, including two children — a greater toll than during the last war, in 2014, which lasted more than seven weeks. The latest victim, a 55-year-old man, died on Saturday after missile shrapnel slammed through the door of his home in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan.

With neither side apparently capable of outright victory, the conflict seems locked in an endless loop of bloodshed. So the focus on civilian casualties has become more intense than ever as a proxy for the moral high ground in a seemingly unwinnable war.

In one of the deadliest episodes of the week, an Israeli missile slammed into an apartment on Friday, killing eight children and two women as they celebrated a major Muslim holiday. Israel said a senior Hamas commander was the target.

Graphic video footage showed Palestinian medics stepping over rubble that included children’s toys and a Monopoly board game as they evacuated the bloodied victims from the pulverized building. The only survivor was an infant boy.

“They weren’t holding weapons, they weren’t firing rockets and they weren’t harming anyone,” said the boy’s father, Mohammed al-Hadidi, who was later seen on television holding his son’s small hand in a hospital.

Although Hamas fires unguided missiles at Israeli cities at a blistering rate, sometimes over 100 at once, the vast majority are either intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defense system or miss their targets, resulting in a relatively low death toll.

Israel sometimes warns Gaza residents to evacuate before an airstrike, and it says it has called off strikes to avoid civilian casualties. But its use of artillery and airstrikes to pound such a confined area, packed with poorly protected people, has led to a death toll 20 times as high as that caused by Hamas, and wounded 1,235 more.

Under international treaties and unwritten rules, combatants are supposed to take all reasonable precautions to limit any civilian damage. But applying those principles in a place like Gaza is a highly contentious affair.

A tunnel in 2018 that Israel said was dug by the Islamic Jihad group at the Israel-Gaza border.Credit…Uriel Sinai for The New York Times

As the Israel Defense Forces strike Gaza with jets, drones and artillery, a key target has been a network of tunnels beneath the Palestinian-controlled territory that the militant Islamic group Hamas is known to use for deploying militants and smuggling weapons.

A spokesman for the Israeli military described the complex network as a “city beneath a city.”

The tunnels were also the main rationale that Israel gave for its ground invasion of Gaza in 2014. Israel’s leaders said afterward that they had destroyed 32 tunnels during that operation, including 14 that penetrated into Israeli territory.

At the time of that fighting, the Israel Defense Forces took reporters into a 6-foot-by-2-foot underground passage running almost two miles under the border to show the threat posed by the tunnels, and the difficulty that Israel has in finding and destroying them.

Here is an excerpt from what The New York Times reported then:

Tunnels from Gaza to Israel have had a powerful hold on the Israeli psyche since 2006, when Hamas militants used one to capture an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was held for five years before being released in a prisoner exchange.

The tunnels can be quite elaborate. The tunnel toured by journalists was reinforced with concrete and had a rack on the wall for electrical wiring. It also featured a metal track along the floor, used by carts that removed dirt during the tunnel’s construction, that could be used to ferry equipment and weapons, the Israeli military said.

Israeli officials acknowledge that it is a difficult technological and operational challenge to destroy all of the subterranean passageways and neutralize the threat they pose. The tunnels are well hidden, said the officer who conducted the tour, and some tunnels are booby-trapped.

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As the worst violence in years rages between the Israeli military and Hamas, each night the sky is lit up by a barrage of missiles and the projectiles designed to counter them.

It is a display of fire and thunder that has been described as both remarkable and horrifying.

The images of Israel’s Iron Dome defense system attempting to shoot down missiles fired by militants in Gaza have been among the most widely shared online, even as the toll wrought by the violence only becomes clear in the light of the next day’s dawn.

“The number of Israelis killed and wounded would be far higher if it had not been for the Iron Dome system, which has been a lifesaver as it always is,” Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, said this week.

The Iron Dome became operational in 2011 and got its biggest first test over eight days in November 2014, when Gaza militants fired some 1,500 rockets aimed at Israel.

While Israeli officials claimed a success rate of up to 90 percent during that conflict, outside experts were skeptical.

The system’s interceptors — just 6 inches wide and 10 feet long — rely on miniature sensors and computerized brains to zero in on short-range rockets. Israel’s larger interceptors — the Patriot and Arrow systems — can fly longer distances to go after bigger threats.

The Iron Dome was recently upgraded, but the details of the changes were not made public.

It is being tested like never before, according to the Israeli military.

“I think it will not be a big mistake to say that even last night there were more missiles than all the missiles fired on Tel Aviv in 2014,” Major General Ori Gordin, commander of Israel’s home front, said during a news conference on Sunday. “Hamas’s attack is very intense in terms of pace of firing.”

Militants in the Gaza Strip have about 3,100 missiles, the Israeli Air Force said on Sunday, noting that about 1,150 of them had been intercepted.

“Despite the layers of defense, there is never 100 percent defense,” Gen. Gordin said. “Sometimes the aerial defense will miss or not be able to intercept, and sometimes people will not get into shelters or lay on the ground and sometimes a whole building will collapse.”

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‘Fighting Must Stop’: U.N. Holds First Public Meeting on Gaza Conflict

The United Nations Security Council met to discuss the crisis in Gaza and Israel on Sunday but took no action, even as members decried the violence. Palestinian and Israeli diplomats spoke at the meeting.

We meet today amid the most serious escalation in Gaza and Israel in years. The current hostilities are utterly appalling. This latest round of violence only perpetuates the cycles of death, destruction and despair and pushes farther to the horizon any hopes of coexistence and peace. Fighting must stop. Remember that each time Israel hears a foreign leader speak of its right to defend itself, it is further emboldened to continue murdering entire families in their sleep. Israel is killing Palestinians in Gaza, one family at a time. Israel is trying to uproot Palestinians from Jerusalem, expelling families, one home, one neighborhood at a time. Israel is persecuting our people, committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. Some may not want to use these words — war crimes and crimes against humanity — but they know they are true. You can create false moral equivalence, immoral equivalence, between the actions of a democracy that sanctifies life and those of a terrorist organization that glorifies death, by calling for restraint, restraint on all sides, and failing to unequivocally condemn Hamas. If you make this choice, it will lead to the success of Hamas’s insidious strategy of firing at Israeli civilians while hiding behind Palestinian civilians. It will lead to the deaths of more innocent Israelis and Palestinians. It will lead to the strengthening of Hamas, the weakening of the Palestinian Authority, and the undermining of the chances for a dialogue.

The United Nations Security Council met to discuss the crisis in Gaza and Israel on Sunday but took no action, even as members decried the violence. Palestinian and Israeli diplomats spoke at the meeting.CreditCredit…Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

International pressure to bring an end to the raging conflict between Israel and Hamas militants has intensified, with the United States stepping up its diplomatic engagement and the United Nations Security Council meeting to discuss the conflict in public for the first time. But the council took no action even as member after member decried the death and devastation.

Secretary-General António Guterres was the first of nearly two dozen speakers on the agenda of the meeting on Sunday, led by China, which holds the council’s rotating presidency for the month of May.

“This latest round of violence only perpetuates the cycles of death, destruction and despair, and pushes farther to the horizon any hopes of coexistence and peace,” Mr. Guterres said. “Fighting must stop. It must stop immediately.”

Palestinian and Israeli diplomats, who were also invited to speak, used the meeting as a high-profile forum to vent longstanding grievances, in effect talking past each other with no sign of any softening in an intractable conflict nearly as old as the United Nations itself.

Riyad al-Maliki, the foreign minister of the Palestinian Authority, implicitly rebuked the United States and other powers that have defended Israel’s right to protect itself from Hamas rocket attacks, asserting that such arguments makes Israel “further emboldened to continue to murder entire families in their sleep.”

Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, who spoke after Mr. Maliki, rejected any attempt to portray the actions of Israel and Hamas as moral equivalents. “Israel uses missiles to protect its children,” Mr. Erdan said. “Hamas uses children to protect its missiles.”

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, said President Biden had spoken with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, while U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had also been engaging with his counterparts in the region.

She called on Hamas to stop its rockets barrage against Israel, expressed concerns about inter-communal violence, warned against incitement on both sides and said the United States was “prepared to lend our support and good offices should the parties seek a cease-fire.”

While envoys from all of the council’s 15 members urged an immediate de-escalation, there was no indication of what next steps the council was prepared to take. Zhang Jun, China’s ambassador, told reporters after the meeting had adjourned that he was continuing to work with other members “to take prompt action and speak in one voice.”

Mr. Netanyahu of Israel vowed late Saturday to continue striking Gaza “until we reach our targets,” suggesting a prolonged assault on the coastal territory even as casualties rose on both sides.

Israeli ground forces on Sunday at the Gaza Border.Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

In separate calls on Saturday, Mr. Biden conferred with Mr. Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, about efforts to broker a cease-fire. While supporting Israel’s right to defend itself from rocket attacks by Hamas militants, Mr. Biden urged Mr. Netanyahu to protect civilians and journalists.

Over the past week, the 15-member U.N. Security Council met privately at least twice to discuss ways of reducing tensions. But efforts to agree a statement or to hold an open meeting had faced resistance from the United States, Israel’s biggest defender on the council.

American officials said they wanted to give mediators sent to the region from the United States, Egypt and Qatar an opportunity to defuse the crisis.

But with violence worsening, a compromise was reached for a meeting on Sunday.

Security Council meetings on the Israeli-Palestinian issue have often ended inconclusively. But they have also demonstrated the widespread view among United Nations members that Israel’s actions as an occupying power are illegal and that its use of deadly force is disproportionately harsh.

The Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem.Credit…Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Our Jerusalem bureau chief, Patrick Kingsley, examined the events that have led to the past week’s violence, the worst between Israelis and Palestinians in years. A little-noticed police action in Jerusalem was among them. He writes:

Twenty-seven days before the first rocket was fired from Gaza this week, a squad of Israeli police officers entered the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, brushed the Palestinian attendants aside and strode across its vast limestone courtyard. Then they cut the cables to the loudspeakers that broadcast prayers to the faithful from four medieval minarets.

It was the night of April 13, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It was also Memorial Day in Israel, which honors those who died fighting for the country. The Israeli president was delivering a speech at the Western Wall, a sacred Jewish site that lies below the mosque, and Israeli officials were concerned that the prayers would drown it out.

Here is his full account of that night and the events that later unfolded.

A damaged building in Petah Tikva, Israel, that was hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip.Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

There is no simple answer to the question “What set off the current violence in Israel?”

But in a recent episode of The Daily, Isabel Kershner, The New York Times’s Jerusalem correspondent, explained the series of recent events that reignited violence in the region.

In Jerusalem, nearly every square foot of land is contested — its ownership and tenancy symbolic of larger abiding questions about who has rightful claim to a city considered holy by three major world religions.

As Isabel explained, a longstanding legal battle over attempts to forcibly evict six Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem heightened tensions in the weeks leading up to the outbreak of violence.

The always tenuous peace was further tested by the overlap of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan with a month of politically charged days in Israel.

A series of provocative events followed: Israeli forces barred people from gathering to celebrate Ramadan outside Damascus Gate, an Old City entrance that is usually a festive meeting place for young people after the breaking of the daily fast during the holy month.

Then young Palestinians filmed themselves slapping an ultra-Orthodox Jew, videos that went viral on TikTok.

And on Jerusalem Day, an annual event marking the capture of East Jerusalem during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, groups of young Israelis marched through the Old City’s Muslim Quarter to reach the Western Wall, chanting “Death to Arabs” along the way.

Stability in the city collapsed after a police raid on the Aqsa Mosque complex, an overture that Palestinians saw as an invasion on holy territory. Muslim worshipers threw rocks, and officers met them with tear gas, rubber-tipped bullets and stun grenades. At least 21 police officers and more than 330 Palestinians were wounded in that fighting.

Listen to the episode to hear how these clashes spiraled into an exchange of airstrikes that has brought Israeli forces to the edge of Gaza — and the brink of war.

Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Israeli-Palestinian Crisis, Reignited

Rockets, airstrikes and mob violence: Why is this happening now, and how much worse could it get?

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Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Israeli-Palestinian Crisis, Reignited

Hosted by Michael Barbaro; produced by Austin Mitchell, Soraya Shockley, Robert Jimison, Annie Brown and Daniel Guillemette; edited by M.J. Davis Lin, with help from Phyllis Fletcher; music by Rachelle Bonja and Dan Powell; and engineered by Chris Wood.

Rockets, airstrikes and mob violence: Why is this happening now, and how much worse could it get?

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

[music]

Over the past few days, the deadliest violence in years has erupted between Israel and Palestinians—

speaker

Intense rocket fire from Gaza answered by Israeli air strikes, showing no sign of easing and—

michael barbaro

—punctuated by hundreds of missiles streaking back and forth between Gaza and cities across Israel.

speaker

Increasingly large numbers of casualties, including children, from Israeli airstrikes in Gaza—

michael barbaro

And now, on the streets of Israel, by shocking scenes of mob violence against both Arabs and Jews.

Today, I spoke with my colleague in Jerusalem, Isabel Kershner, about why it’s all happening and just how much worse it may get.

It’s Thursday, May 13th.

Isabel, I know there may not be a simple answer to this question. But what was the trigger for this eruption of violence in Jerusalem over the past few weeks?

isabel kershner

Well, one of the triggers for sure is actually a case of six Palestinian families who are facing a looming eviction by Jewish landlords from their houses that they’ve been living in since the 1950s in a very small quiet leafy neighborhood of East Jerusalem, not far from the old city.

speaker

In the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, the tension has been growing for weeks. Several Palestinian families face eviction from their homes. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] We are in the right. We are still resisting. We are staying here even if they don’t want us.

isabel kershner

This is a case that’s been bubbling on for years and years.

speaker

We don’t understand why Arabs are here. I don’t want any problems. But this land is Jewish and belongs to us. We don’t believe anyone, not the courts or anyone else.

isabel kershner

The Israeli government has cast it as a small private real estate dispute. But it’s far from that.

So you’re talking about families who were displaced and made refugees during 1948, the war surrounding the creation of Israel. And they lost their homes in what became Israel. And they moved to that area of East Jerusalem when the Jordanians were in control. And the Jordanian government actually offered them an option in conjunction with the United Nations Refugee Agency at the time. They said, we’ll build some houses in this neighborhood, a few dozen houses. And you can come live in them. And we will register them for you. And in return, you should give up your refugee status. And the families actually agreed to that and moved into the houses. But at the end of the day, somehow the Jordanian government never actually finally registered them in their names.

So then, in 1967, the Middle East war breaks out. And Jordan loses control of the land of East Jerusalem and Israel takes control of it. Israel after the ‘67 war annexed that territory. But that move was never internationally recognized. And most of the world still considers it occupied territory. And although there was an agreement between the Jordanians and these Palestinian families over these homes, the land they sit on now gets to be controlled by Israel. And on top of that, although this is now a Palestinian populated area predominantly, the land was bought by a Jewish trust in the 19th Century. And then in the meantime, religious trusts have sold the rights to a real estate agency, people who want to move Jews back into that neighborhood. And there is nothing more in the Palestinian mindset, nothing more upsetting than the refugee issue. So it just took on much bigger proportions. It’s not just about renting or an eviction order or a few houses. It suddenly becomes a national issue.

michael barbaro

So this is pretty complicated. But to summarize, these refugee Palestinian families were given these homes in the 1950s and told that it would be their home for good. But that didn’t happen. It’s still the case that legally these homes belong to Jewish landlords. And now those Jewish landlords are saying to these Palestinian families, we want you out. And in part, they want them out because they want Jewish people to control these properties in East Jerusalem.

isabel kershner

That’s correct. And they’re able to do that based on a 1970s law which allows Jewish property owners to reclaim property in the East side of the city. But then, on the other side, the Palestinians do not have the same recourse to reclaim properties they left on the West side of the city or elsewhere in Israel. So this has created a huge imbalance. And the dispute has gone from the District Court all the way up to the Supreme Court. And we were waiting for a final verdict in the case of whether the evictions would go ahead or not on Monday.

michael barbaro

So Isabel, about how does this legal conflict over these evictions spiral into what we are seeing now? How does that happen?

isabel kershner

OK, good question, because there are many, many other strands to this story. And I think one thing we have to look at is the calendar. We have been in a month that has been extraordinary in many ways. So on the one hand, we’ve had the month of Ramadan in the Islamic lunar calendar. And Ramadan, the lunar calendar, it moves. So this year, Ramadan fell from mid-April to now. So it also coincided with a month in the Hebrew calendar. And you also have quite a lot of emotive dates. You have the Memorial Day for fallen soldiers, you have the Independence Day, you get towards the end of the month and you get Jerusalem Day, which is the day when some Israelis, not all, are celebrating what they call the reunification of Jerusalem in the 1967 war. I mean, this is a day where the Israelis are marking conquering the eastern part of the city, placing the Palestinians in the city generally on the other side of the line in what became occupied East Jerusalem.

michael barbaro

Got it.

isabel kershner

And that can be a very provocative day as well because a central feature of it is what they call the flag parade, which is usually thousands of young right wing mostly Jewish youths who March traditionally on a very contentious route— right through the Muslim quarter of the old city to get to the Wailing Wall. And of course, that was supposed to happen also on— yes, you guessed it— Monday.

michael barbaro

So Monday of this past week becomes, through the eviction case and through the calendar, a kind of swirling collision of Palestinian grief and Israeli celebration and just a kind of powder keg, it sounds like.

isabel kershner

And we also had a lot else going on in the city building up to this day. Ramadan is a time when the city is very much on edge. It’s a time of religious and nationalist fervor for many people. And it started with several other potential points of ignition. So you had the police, for example, barring Palestinians from gathering at Damascus Gate. Damascus Gate is one of the most beautiful and historic entrances to the old city from the East side. And it has these steps and going down to a Plaza— a bit like a kind of amphitheater. And every night during Ramadan, traditionally every year, Palestinians come. They gather there. They break their fast. There are cultural events. And it’s a general kind of party, a festival atmosphere. But for some reason this year, the police banned anyone from gathering and sitting on the steps. They put up barricades and said it was for public order to allow people to safely enter and exit the old city. And this created huge tension.

[siren wailing]

So it actually turned into a battlefield. Every night, you would have the police trying to disperse the crowds there. Young Palestinians would protest. And it would end in clashes.

We also had what became known as the TikTok attacks.

michael barbaro

What are those?

isabel kershner

So there were a couple of Palestinian 17-year-old youths who filmed themselves for a TikTok video slapping an ultra Orthodox Jew while he was sitting on the light rail train. And it kind of went viral. And there were one or two other similar attacks. And people just took great affront.

And it ended up with hundreds of young Israeli Jews marching to Damascus Gate, chanting things, including death to Arabs. And in the end, you had the police acting as a buffer between them and the Palestinian protesters at Damascus Gate and pitched battles on both sides with the police. So that was one of the strands of great tension building up towards this Monday.

michael barbaro

So a very unstable situation is very much ignited by actions taken by multiple groups of people on the ground in Jerusalem, including the Israeli police.

isabel kershner

Right. So we come to Monday morning after all this buildup, of all these different tensions in the city in this very tense month. And we get to the point where we’ve had Laylatul Qadr, which is a very holy day for Muslims at the end of Ramadan when thousands of worshippers spend the night traditionally in the compound of the Aqsa Mosque, which is the third holiest site in Islam. And it’s also probably one of the most hotly contested sites in the world because it’s also the holiest place for Jews. They know it as Temple Mount. And it’s the location of two ancient temples. So on Monday morning, which is Jerusalem Day as well, there were Jewish groups who were planning, as they traditionally do, to go up to the Temple Mount on a visit. And the Muslim worshipers, many of whom, as I say, had been there overnight were expecting them, ready for what they would see as a kind of invasion on their holy territory on a very holy time of year. The police stopped the Jewish groups from going up. But what we did see was the police in large numbers raid the compound.

[interposing voices][explosion]

There are many different takes on whether they went in just to disperse crowds or they went in to stop stone throwing by protesters at the site that had already started or whether the stones only started after the police arrived. But whatever the exact circumstances, you ended up with a large police raid on the Aqsa Mosque compound.

And it ended in stone throwing clashes with police responding with tear gas, rubber tip bullets, stun grenades. And by the end of the main part of this confrontation, you have, on the one side, 330 Palestinians who’ve been injured, 250 who were actually treated in the hospitals. And on the other side, 21 police officers injured.

michael barbaro

So Isabel, what happens after this police raid on the mosque? How do Palestinians respond?

isabel kershner

So by the afternoon, we get an ultimatum from Hamas, the Islamic group that holds Sway in Gaza, saying, if the Israelis do not remove all their forces from the mosque compound and from the area of East Jerusalem, the Palestinian area where the evictions were about to take place, something would happen.

michael barbaro

And they don’t specify what that something is. But it will be serious.

isabel kershner

Israel will be paying the price.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

So Isabel, about what happens on Monday with this 6:00 PM deadline from Hamas for Israeli security forces to withdraw from East Jerusalem and from the mosque?

isabel kershner

Well, clearly the Israelis were not going to comply. So we waited till 6 o’clock. And lo and behold, 3 minutes past 6:00, we’re sitting here in our office in Jerusalem. And suddenly, we hear sirens wailing, incoming rocket warnings. And within maybe a minute—

[explosion]

—we suddenly hear a series of booms. There’s a feeling that Jerusalem is under attack.

michael barbaro

So once this deadline passes, Hamas sends missiles over into Jerusalem?

isabel kershner

Yeah. They’re aiming towards Jerusalem. One was intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome, the anti-missile defense system. Others actually fell in communities and empty ground in the hills West of Jerusalem. And nobody was killed or hurt, but there was some property damage. And this was highly unusual and clearly was not going to go without an Israeli response.

michael barbaro

And what is that response?

isabel kershner

Well, Israel had clearly been anticipating some kind of action from Gaza and always has what it calls a bank of targets that its built up. And Israel immediately began with airstrikes in Gaza. And now Gaza is a very small and crowded territory. So even if Israel says it’s targeting military targets with very precise weapons and taking all the precautions it can to avoid civilian casualties, inevitably there are civilian casualties as well. So from the beginning, the air strikes were deadly. There were two children killed very early on that night. And each side just kept stepping it up.

Israel taking down tower blocks in Gaza, multi-storey buildings that housed Hamas offices or headquarters of various types of Hamas. And Hamas again issued another ultimatum and said to Israel, if you hit any more civilian buildings, we’re going to hit Tel Aviv. And a huge, huge Salvo barrages of rockets began streaming out of Gaza and slamming into suburbs around Tel Aviv. Things have just been escalating all the way. So by Wednesday afternoon, two days into the conflict, we have at least 53 Palestinians killed, according to the Gaza health officials, 14 of them children, and more than 300 wounded. And on the Israeli side, you have at least six people who’ve been killed and scores injured.

michael barbaro

Isabel, it is often felt in moments like this that Hamas’s missile attacks, as terrifying as they are to Israelis, often fail to inflict significant damage on Israel based on the technology that Hamas is using and that the Israeli counterattacks tend to be much better targeted and more destructive. And the death toll seems to suggest that that has been the case so far here— a kind of disproportionate impact.

isabel kershner

Look, disproportionate is a term that is often used. I think there’s certainly— the circumstances that Israel has total air superiority in terms of its Air Force. The Hamas rockets are rather inaccurate. Israel does have the Iron Dome system which manages to intercept the authorities, say, about 90 percent of rockets that are headed to population centers in Israel. But the Gaza Strip is just first of all very crowded, very densely populated. The Israelis will tell you that Hamas operates from civilian areas within Gaza, making it very, very, very difficult to avoid collateral damage.

michael barbaro

At this point, is it fair to describe what’s happening here as a war, as war like? What is this?

isabel kershner

It feels pretty war like. If we end up with a ground campaign on the Israeli forces side, it will definitely be a war.

michael barbaro

And is there talk of a ground operation?

isabel kershner

Well, no confirmation of one. But some preparations seem to be being made. There are some call ups of reserves, there are some troops and vehicles moving down towards the border. So it’s not being ruled out. But it’s hard to tell. I think Israel won’t rush into a ground invasion because they are usually very costly. But sometimes, it’s part of the tactical war to signal that you’re ready for one, which could also be what’s going on.

michael barbaro

What are the leaders on all sides of this saying about this moment and how it might come to an end? I realize that’s a tricky question because both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership is very much in flux. But what are they saying about it?

isabel kershner

So we heard on Wednesday night a very strong statement from President Mahmoud Abbas— he leads the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and is a main rival of Hamas. And he was basically telling Israel, end your occupation. And we’ve been hearing more from Hamas. So Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas political leader, sends a recorded address to a Hamas affiliated television station—

ismail haniyeh

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

isabel kershner

He spoke about being contacted by Egypt, Qatar, the United Nations with some kind of talk of maybe working towards the ceasefire.

ismail haniyeh

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

isabel kershner

But he said, since in his view, Israel had started this, it was Israel’s responsibility to be the ones to begin to end it.

ismail haniyeh

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

isabel kershner

On the Israeli side, we’re hearing that we’re not done yet. The defense minister said on Wednesday, there’s no end date. And the night before, the Prime Minister also said, this could take some time.

[music]michael barbaro

So it sounds like from leadership, there’s not an eagerness to quickly bring this to an end.

isabel kershner

Right, it does seem that on both sides— they’re not rushing to end this. And it might actually be helping them.

michael barbaro

How so?

isabel kershner

On the Palestinian side, you have Hamas operating really in a vacuum with Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, who’s aging and weak, and Hamas really trying to reinstate itself using its currency of leading the resistance and defending Jerusalem, which is always a rallying cry on the Palestinian side. And on the Israeli side, you have a very confused situation because Prime Minister Netanyahu is currently standing trial on corruption charges. He has been unable to form a government after four elections in two years. And his rivals were working on trying to form an alternative coalition which would have seen him removed from office for the first time in 12 years. And I think we’re not sure how this is going to play out. But somehow, he might well be able to capitalize on this time as being not the right time to have a change in government.

michael barbaro

Isabel, we started this conversation by talking about the eviction case in East Jerusalem that, in many people’s eyes, lit the fuse that has now turned into this war like conflict. What has happened with that ruling?

isabel kershner

So the ruling was supposed to come on Monday. On Sunday, after the government had spent weeks saying, this is just a private real estate dispute, the attorney general finally stepped in and asked for a delay in the case so that he could study the materials, get involved, state an opinion. And the judges gave him a month, suspending the verdict for at least 30 days. This is one case where the Israelis stepped in to try and diffuse a situation. But of course, it was too little too late.

michael barbaro

So this ruling has been delayed, but not for all that long. And eventually when it comes out, it will no doubt influence the course of this conflict that has erupted over the past few weeks. But it strikes me as odd and maybe a bit ironic that the Israeli government has called this eviction case a real estate dispute when you could argue that the entire history of the Israeli-Palestanian conflict is ultimately a dispute over real estate— over land and over the idea of home.

isabel kershner

You certainly could see it that way. I mean, with all the security and national and religious aspects to this conflict that’s been going on for a century, at the end of the day, it’s about who rules territory where and who gets to call a place home. Yeah.

[music]michael barbaro

Isabel, as always, thank you very much.

isabel kershner

Thank you.

michael barbaro

The Times reports that as the conflict expands, rival mobs of Jews and Arabs are carrying out violent attacks in several Israeli cities and towns. One occurred in a suburb of Tel Aviv where dozens of Jewish extremists took turns beating and kicking an Arab motorcycle driver even as his body lay motionless on the ground. Another occurred in northern Israel where an Arab mob beat a Jewish man with sticks and rocks, leaving him in critical condition.

On Wednesday night, the United Nations warned that the conflict could soon intensify into, quote, “all out war“. And the Biden administration dispatched a senior American diplomat to the Middle East to meet with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and to urge both sides to de-escalate.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, during a closed door vote, House Republicans ousted Representative, Liz Cheney, as their party’s third highest ranking leader over her decision to speak out against former President Trump— his role in the January 6 riot at the Capitol and his lies about fraud in the 2020 election.

liz cheney

I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office.

michael barbaro

After the vote, Cheney said she had no regrets and vowed that she would continue to speak out against Trump and seek to break his hold over the Republican Party.

liz cheney

We have seen the danger that he continues to provoke with his language. We have seen his lack of commitment and dedication to the Constitution. And I think it’s fair—

michael barbaro

And the company that operates the major fuel pipeline shut down by a cyber attack said that the pipeline’s operations had begun to resume. The shutdown of the pipeline had raised fears of gas shortages and triggered panicked buying in several states, including Florida, Georgia, and Alabama.

Today’s episode was produced by Austin Mitchell, Soraya Shockley, Robert Jimison, Annie Brown, and Daniel Guillemette. It was edited by M.J. Davis Lin with help from Phyllis Fletcher. It was engineered by Chris Wood and contains original music by Rachelle Bonja and Dan Powell.

[music]

That’s it for The Daily. I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

Here’s what you need to know:

Searching for survivors under the rubble of a building hit overnight by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City on Sunday.Credit…Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

International pressure to bring an end to the raging conflict between Israel and Hamas militants mounted on Sunday, even as local health officials said an Israeli airstrike in Gaza overnight killed at least two dozen people, the single deadliest attack of the current hostilities.

The dead included women and children, the Gaza Health Ministry said in a statement to The Associated Press.

On Sunday morning, rescue workers combed through the rubble of three buildings flattened in the Israeli airstrike as the hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians escalated to levels not seen since a 2014 war.

With the conflict stretching into its seventh straight day, the United States stepped up its diplomatic engagement and the United Nations Security Council was scheduled to meet to discuss the conflict for the first time on Sunday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel vowed late Saturday to continue striking Gaza “until we reach our targets,” suggesting a prolonged assault on the coastal territory even as casualties rose on both sides.

In separate calls on Saturday, President Biden conferred with Mr. Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, about efforts to broker a cease-fire. While supporting Israel’s right to defend itself from rocket attacks by Hamas militants, Mr. Biden urged Mr. Netanyahu to protect civilians and journalists.

Even before Sunday morning’s attack, Israeli airstrikes had intensified over the weekend, with an attack on a house in a refugee camp in Gaza that killed 10 members of an extended family, including women and children, and another that destroyed a high-rise that housed media outlets including The A.P. and Al Jazeera.

Israeli defense officials said the building housed military assets belonging to Hamas and they provided advance warning to civilians in the building to allow evacuation. No casualties were reported in that strike.

More than 170 Palestinians had been killed in Israeli airstrikes and shelling in Gaza, and 12 Israelis had died in Hamas rocket attacks.

Over the past week, the 15-member U.N. Security Council met privately at least twice to discuss ways of reducing tensions. But efforts to reach agreement on a statement or to hold an open meeting had faced resistance from the United States, Israel’s biggest defender on the council.

American officials said they wanted to give mediators sent to the region from the United States, Egypt and Qatar an opportunity to defuse the crisis.

But with violence worsening, a compromise was reached for a meeting on Sunday at 10 a.m. Eastern time, to be held via videoconference because of pandemic restrictions, and streamed live on a U.N. website.

The American ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said in a statement posted on Twitter after the meeting was announced that “the U.S. will continue to actively engage in diplomacy at the highest levels to try to de-escalate tensions.”

Security Council meetings on the Israeli-Palestinian issue have often ended inconclusively and served mainly as a platform for supporters of both sides to air their grievances. But they have also demonstrated the widespread view among United Nations members that Israel’s actions as an occupying power are illegal and that its use of deadly force is disproportionately harsh.

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Israel Strikes Gaza Tower Housing A.P. and Other News Media

An Israeli airstrike destroyed a prominent building in Gaza City on Saturday that housed media outlets, including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The Israel Defense Forces said it gave an advanced warning for civilians to evacuate.

We are shocked and horrified that the Israelis would target the building that housed A.P.‘s bureau in Gaza. They long knew that A.P.’s bureau was there, and they targeted it. Now, fortunately, we had a warning, and we were able to get our journalists out. We narrowly escaped a huge loss of life. We had 12 journalists in that building. And those brave journalists not only got out, but they were able to salvage much of our equipment because it’s important that we continue to tell this story. You see, that building provided the best vantage point for the world to see the events in Gaza, and now that building is destroyed. And we will work hard to continue to tell the world the important events of Gaza, and we will keep our journalists safe.

An Israeli airstrike destroyed a prominent building in Gaza City on Saturday that housed media outlets, including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The Israel Defense Forces said it gave an advanced warning for civilians to evacuate.CreditCredit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

The prominent 12-story building in Gaza City that was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike on Saturday not only housed the offices of media organizations including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera.

It also offered a vantage point for the world on Gaza, as A.P. cameras positioned on the roof terrace captured Israeli bombardments and Palestinian militants’ rocket attacks during periodic flare-ups in fighting — including over the past week.

“The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what transpired today,” the A.P.’s president, Gary Pruitt, said in a statement following the Israeli attack.

The leveling of the al-Jalaa tower, which occurred as fighting between Israelis and Palestinians spiraled on several fronts, drew condemnations from across the world. The Israel Defense Forces said that its fighter jets struck the tower because it also contained military assets belonging to Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that rules the Gaza Strip.

Mr. Pruitt called on the I.D.F. to present evidence to support its allegation, adding that the news agency had operated from the building for 15 years.

“We have had no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building,” he said. “This is something we actively check to the best of our ability. We would never knowingly put our journalists at risk.”

On Sunday, the I.D.F. tweeted that the building was “an important base of operations” for Hamas military intelligence, where it “gathered intel for attacks against Israel, manufactured weapons & positioned equipment to hamper I.D.F. operations.”

The I.D.F. — which frequently accuses Hamas of using civilians as shields — provided advance warning to civilians in the building to allow evacuation. The A.P. reported that the owner of the building, Jawad Mahdi, was “told he had an hour to make sure everyone has left the building.”

In the minutes before the airstrike, Mr. Mahdi was filmed desperately pleading with the Israeli Army, asking them to allow four journalists who had been filming an interview — with the father of four children slain in an Israeli strike on a refugee camp on Saturday morning — an extra 10 minutes to retrieve their belongings.

An Israeli soldier told him: “There will be no 10 minutes.”

Minutes later, the building was destroyed, engulfed in a plume of black smoke.

The A.P. said that it “narrowly avoided a terrible loss of life,” and that a dozen journalists and freelancers inside the building evacuated before the strike. The building also housed apartments on the lower floors.

Press freedom groups said that the strike — coming a day after the Israeli Army erroneously told foreign media that ground troops had entered Gaza — raised concerns that Israel was interfering with independent reporting on the conflict. In a statement, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists questioned whether the I.D.F. was “deliberately targeting media facilities in order to disrupt coverage of the human suffering in Gaza.”

A White House spokeswoman, Jennifer Psaki, tweeted that the United States had “communicated directly to the Israelis that ensuring the safety and security of journalists and independent media is a paramount responsibility.” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that he was “deeply disturbed” by the strike and warned that “indiscriminate targeting of civilian and media structures” would violate international law.

After the strike, journalists from other news organizations gathered near the rubble. Heba Akila, an Al Jazeera journalist who had been broadcasting from the tower when the warning call was made, said: “This is clearly to silence the truth and the voices of journalists.”

1. Israel’s Iron Dome system intercepting rockets launched from GazaAnas Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
2. Streaks through the sky left by the Iron Dome systemFatima Shbair/Getty Images
3. Ashkelon, IsraelNir Elias/Reuters
4. Ashdod, IsraelMenahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
5. Sderot, IsraelJack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
6. Ashkelon, IsraelJack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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As the worst violence in years rages between the Israeli military and Hamas, each night the sky is lit up by a barrage of missiles streaking across the sky and the projectiles designed to counter them.

It is a display of fire and thunder that has been described as both remarkable and horrifying.

The images of Israel’s Iron Dome defense system attempting to shoot down missiles fired by militants in Gaza have been among the most widely shared online, even as the toll wrought by the violence only becomes clear in the light of the next day’s dawn.

“The number of Israelis killed and wounded would be far higher if it had not been for the Iron Dome system, which has been a lifesaver as it always is,” Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, said this week.

The Iron Dome became operational in 2011 and got its biggest first test over eight days in November 2014, when Gaza militants fired some 1,500 rockets aimed at Isreal.

While Israeli officials claimed a success rate of up to 90 percent during that conflict, outside experts were skeptical.

The systems’s interceptors — just 6 inches wide and 10 feet long — rely on miniature sensors and computerized brains to zero in on short-range rockets. Israel’s larger interceptors — the Patriot and Arrow systems — can fly longer distances to go after bigger threats.

The Iron Dome was recently upgraded, but the details of the changes were not made public.

In the current conflict, militants in the Gaza Strip have fired nearly 3,000 missiles, the Israeli Air Force said on Sunday, noting that about 1,150 of them had been intercepted.

The Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem.Credit…Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Our Jerusalem bureau chief, Patrick Kingsley, examined the events that have led to the past week’s violence, the worst between Israelis and Palestinians in years. A little-noticed police action in Jerusalem was among them. He writes:

Twenty-seven days before the first rocket was fired from Gaza this week, a squad of Israeli police officers entered the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, brushed the Palestinian attendants aside and strode across its vast limestone courtyard. Then they cut the cables to the loudspeakers that broadcast prayers to the faithful from four medieval minarets.

It was the night of April 13, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It was also Memorial Day in Israel, which honors those who died fighting for the country. The Israeli president was delivering a speech at the Western Wall, a sacred Jewish site that lies below the mosque, and Israeli officials were concerned that the prayers would drown it out.

Here is his full account of that night and the events that later unfolded.

A pro-Palestinian protest near the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Saturday.Credit…Gamal Diab/EPA, via Shutterstock

As the conflict between Israel and Hamas stretched into its seventh day, pro-Palestinian demonstrations were held in cities around the world, even as leaders across Europe expressed concern about a rise in anti-Semitic attacks.

On Saturday, hundreds of demonstrators in Washington marched from the Washington Monument to the U.S. Capitol in protest of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people and what they said was an inadequate response from the United States.

“People think they can be neutral about this. That’s absolutely wrong,” said Alexandra-Ola Chaic, 17, who traveled to the rally from Burke, Va., with her family, which is of Palestinian descent. “We have to do what we can to make this an issue that receives political support.”

The crowd that gathered was diverse in age and background, and included many families with young children.

Ruth Soto, 25, from Northern Virginia, came with her sister to show solidarity with Palestinians. She said the displacement of Palestinians felt personal to her because her family fled war in Central America to come to the United States illegally.

“We’ve seen the struggle, being displaced from your home,” she said. “This is a way we can help them.”

In London, a pro-Palestinian march on Saturday attracted thousands of protesters, and similar demonstrations were held in cities around the world.

At the same time, there was growing concern about a rise in attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions.

France banned a pro-Palestinian protest in Paris, citing the “sensitive” international context and the risk of acts of violence against synagogues and Israeli interests in the French capital.

Paris protest organizers pressed ahead on Saturday despite the ban. The police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse the rally, which had drawn about 3,000 people, Agence France-Presse reported.

This past week, German protesters attacked synagogues, burned Israeli flags and marched through the streets chanting slurs against Jews.

Felix Klein, a German official tasked with countering anti-Semitism, said: “It is appalling how obviously Jews in Germany are being held responsible here for actions of the Israeli government in which they are completely uninvolved.”

Britain experienced a sharp increase in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the past week, a charity said on Saturday.

The Adat Yeshua Messianic Synagogue in Norwich, England, which was defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti.Credit…Adat Yeshua Messianic Synagogue

The Community Security Trust, a charity that records anti-Semitic threats, said it had received more than 50 reports of Jews across Britain being threatened and verbally abused in the past week — a 490 percent increase from the previous seven days. It said it believed that many more attacks had gone unreported.

Offensive phrases and slogans about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been shouted at Jewish people of all ages, including children, said Dave Rich, the charity’s director of policy. “When the conflict in Israel reaches this level of intensity, we always see increases in anti-Semitic incidents,” he said.

Israeli ground forces at the Gaza border on Friday.Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

Israel’s top military spokesman on Saturday apologized to foreign journalists for wrongly announcing early Friday that Israeli troops had entered the Gaza Strip in a ground attack, insisting that it was an “honest mistake,” even after Israeli news outlets called it a deliberate deception aimed at luring Hamas fighters into Israeli gun sights.

Early Friday, the I.D.F. announced on Twitter that “air and ground troops are currently attacking in the Gaza Strip.” It later clarified that statement to say ground troops were firing into Gaza from Israel.

The spokesman, Brig. Gen. Hidai Zilberman, said he understood the “frustration” of journalists who reported as fact what turned out to be fiction. But he sought to assure Western reporters in Israel that no one was trying to turn them into tools of the Israeli military.

“Despite conspiratorial reports to the contrary in both international and Israeli press, this was not some elaborate attempt to manipulate the media in order to achieve a tactical victory,” General Zilberman wrote in a letter to the Foreign Press Association’s president, Andrew Carey of CNN.

“By definition and our guiding belief system, the I.D.F. Spokesperson’s Unit does not engage in psychological warfare and is tasked with conveying only the truth to the public, a mission we have devotedly undertaken for more than seven decades.”

Gen. Zilberman added no new details to explain how his office misled foreign journalists or why it had taken hours to correct itself. But he reiterated that the Israeli military’s relationship with foreign news organizations was “of paramount importance to us” and was “based on mutual trust and respect.”

The possibility that the military had used the international news media to kill fighters in Gaza prompted sharp objections from several news organizations.

“If they used us, it’s unacceptable,” said Daniel Estrin, N.P.R.’s correspondent in Jerusalem. “And if not, then what’s the story — and why is the Israeli media widely reporting that we were duped?”

For its part, the Foreign Press Association on Saturday protested an Israeli attack on a Gaza office tower that housed the offices of The Associated Press and Al Jazeera, saying in a statement that it “raises deeply worrying questions about Israel’s willingness to interfere with the freedom of the press to operate.”

1. Gaza CityHosam Salem for The New York Times
2. Tel AvivCorinna Kern for The New York Times
3. East JerusalemEmmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
4. Sderot, IsraelAriel Schalit/Associated Press
5. GazaHosam Salem for The New York Times
6. Jaffa, IsraelCorinna Kern for The New York Times
7. Ramat Gan, IsraelCorinna Kern for The New York Times
8. Jaffa, IsraelAhmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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A new round of deadly violence erupted in the Middle East over the past week, as Israeli airstrikes hit targets in Gaza and the militant group Hamas launched rockets at cities inside Israel.

A damaged building in Petah Tikva, Israel, that was hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip.Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

There is no simple answer to the question “What set off the current violence in Israel?”

But in a recent episode of The Daily, Isabel Kershner, The New York Times’s Jerusalem correspondent, explained the series of recent events that reignited violence in the region.

In Jerusalem, nearly every square foot of land is contested — its ownership and tenancy symbolic of larger abiding questions about who has rightful claim to a city considered holy by three major world religions.

As Isabel explained, a longstanding legal battle over attempts to forcibly evict six Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem heightened tensions in the weeks leading up to the outbreak of violence.

The always tenuous peace was further tested by the overlap of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan with a month of politically charged days in Israel.

A series of provocative events followed: Israeli forces barred people from gathering to celebrate Ramadan outside Damascus Gate, an Old City entrance that is usually a festive meeting place for young people after the breaking of the daily fast during the holy month.

Then young Palestinians filmed themselves slapping an ultra-Orthodox Jew, videos that went viral on TikTok.

And on Jerusalem Day, an annual event marking the capture of East Jerusalem during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, groups of young Israelis marched through the Old City’s Muslim Quarter to reach the Western Wall, chanting “Death to Arabs” along the way.

Stability in the city collapsed after a police raid on the Aqsa Mosque complex, an overture that Palestinians saw as an invasion on holy territory. Muslim worshipers threw rocks, and officers met them with tear gas, rubber-tipped bullets and stun grenades. At least 21 police officers and more than 330 Palestinians were wounded in that fighting.

Listen to the episode to hear how these clashes spiraled into an exchange of airstrikes that has brought Israeli forces to the edge of Gaza — and the brink of war.

Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Israeli-Palestinian Crisis, Reignited

Rockets, airstrikes and mob violence: Why is this happening now, and how much worse could it get?

Here’s what you need to know:

Israeli artillery at the border with Gaza on Thursday.Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

Israeli ground forces bombarded Gaza with artillery on Friday, escalating a conflict that has already brought Israeli airstrikes, Palestinian rocket attacks and sectarian violence on the streets of Israeli cities.

As world leaders called for calm and American and Egyptian officials tried to broker an end to the violence, the fighting that began on Monday ratcheted up instead. By Friday morning, the Israeli authorities reported that eight Israelis, including one soldier, had been killed. Palestinian health officials reported the death toll in Gaza at 120 and the overall number of wounded in the latest violence at 900.

The Israeli military said on Friday that it had killed 75 operatives of Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza. It said that more than 2,000 rockets had been fired from Gaza (including about 400 that fell short of Israeli territory), while the Gaza authorities reported more than 150 strikes from Israeli jets and drones, along with the artillery fire, wounding more than 50 people overnight.

“This is the largest focused operation against a focused target that we have conducted so far,” said Jonathan Conricus, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces. Hidai Zilberman, another spokesman, told Kan Radio on Friday that the Israel Defense Forces had deployed as many as 160 aircraft at once in the attack.

Mr. Conricus said the target of the attack was a network of tunnels underneath the Palestinian-controlled territory, through which Hamas is known to deploy militants and smuggle weapons. The spokesman described the complex network as a “city beneath a city.”

The Israel Defense Forces clarified that no Israeli troops were actually in Gaza despite earlier reports to the contrary. Instead, the army had massed troops along the Gazan border and was shelling the territory from Israel.

The sky glowing orange after an Israeli airstrike in the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday.Credit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

“This operation will continue as long as it takes to restore peace and security to the State of Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement released early Friday.

Mr. Zilberman warned that the operation might intensify, saying that “all options are on the table, and forces are preparing and will continue to accumulate during the holiday” — the feast of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

Hamas launched dozens of rocket volleys overnight at Israeli targets, killing an 87-year-old woman who was running to a safe room.

The latest round of Israeli-Palestinian unrest began Monday after clashes between protesters and the Israeli police at the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Hamas then began firing into Israel with the increasingly potent rockets it has built with the aid of Iran, and Israel responded with air attacks on Hamas and other militant targets in Gaza.

The Biden administration has called for peaceful resolution, while insisting that the rocket attacks on Israel must stop and refraining from any public criticism of Israel.

But the two entrenched sides did not appear ready to cede ground.

“The Americans are talking to me, the Egyptians are talking to me,” Israel’s defense minister, Benny Gantz, said during a video meeting with local council heads, “but I remain focused on the reason we went out on this campaign: to make Hamas and Islamic Jihad pay a price.”

Buildings hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip are seen in Petah Tikv, Israel, on Thursday.Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

The most surprising turn has been the violence between Jews and Arabs who have lived side by side in Israeli cities, with reports of gangs of people from one group pummeling members of another. Riots, stone throwing and protests continued overnight.

The crisis has come at a time when Israel’s political leaders are struggling to form a government after four inconclusive elections in two years. Mr. Netanyahu’s attempt to build a majority coalition in the Israeli Parliament failed, and his rival, Yair Lapid, had been invited to try to form a government.

Workers fixing a power line after an Israeli strike in Gaza City on Thursday.Credit…Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

Before the current crisis, Gazans already lived in what one United Nations human rights official called a “toxic slum”: a jagged strip of land blockaded indefinitely by Israel and Egypt whose roughly two million residents endured daily power outages of up to 16 hours and running water that worked only every other day.

Now, they are down to about five hours of electricity per day and half their usual water supply, according to an Israeli security official. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of briefing rules, said the shortages were partly because Israel has closed the border crossing through which most of Gaza’s fuel arrives, but also because Hamas, the militant group that governs the area, shot off rockets that damaged power lines. That claim could not be independently confirmed.

The official said that the power lines to two Gaza sewage treatment plants were damaged or down, and the U.N.’s humanitarian aid coordination agency said that a water desalination plant was not operational, cutting 250,000 residents off from water. About 150,000 people in Gaza City had limited access to water because the power cuts were affecting the piped supply, the agency added.

Gaza usually gets roughly a quarter of its electricity from Israel, with another portion coming from a power plant in the territory that relies on fuel from Israel, plus donated fuel from Qatar and aid groups. Before the current conflict, that left the area perpetually short of half to two-thirds of its power needs, meaning residents had no more than eight consecutive hours of electricity, according to Gisha, a Gaza-focused advocacy group. Those who could afford it turned to diesel generators to cover the gap.

Eager to push back on the idea that Israel alone is responsible for Gazans’ deteriorating living conditions, senior officials at the Israeli defense agency that deals with the West Bank and Gaza, , known as COGAT, said that Hamas was using Gaza residents as a “human shield.”

“Instead of focusing on welfare and economy,” the head of the agency’s civil department, Col. Elad Goren, said on Wednesday, “it’s focusing on violence and incitement.”

The lack of power was starting to affect hospitals, which were already at full capacity because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Gisha group said. The Gaza Health Ministry on Friday called on Israel to open a border crossing for patients to receive treatment and medical personnel and supplies to enter.

A tunnel in 2018 that Israel said was dug by the Islamic Jihad group at the Israel-Gaza border.Credit…Uriel Sinai for The New York Times

As the Israel Defense Forces strike Gaza with jets, drones and artillery, a key target has been a network of tunnels beneath the Palestinian-controlled territory that the militant Islamic group Hamas is known to use for deploying militants and smuggling weapons.

A spokesman for the Israeli military described the complex network as a “city beneath a city.”

The tunnels were also the main rationale that Israel gave for its ground invasion of Gaza in 2014. Israel’s leaders said afterward that they had destroyed 32 tunnels during that operation, including 14 that penetrated into Israeli territory.

At the time of that fighting, the Israel Defense Forces took reporters into a 6-foot-by-2-foot underground passage running almost two miles under the border to show the threat posed by the tunnels, and the difficulty that Israel has in finding and destroying them.

Here is an excerpt from what The New York Times reported then:

Tunnels from Gaza to Israel have had a powerful hold on the Israeli psyche since 2006, when Hamas militants used one to capture an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was held for five years before being released in a prisoner exchange.

The tunnels can be quite elaborate. The tunnel toured by journalists was reinforced with concrete and had a rack on the wall for electrical wiring. It also featured a metal track along the floor, used by carts that removed dirt during the tunnel’s construction, that could be used to ferry equipment and weapons, the Israeli military said.

Israeli officials acknowledge that it is a difficult technological and operational challenge to destroy all of the subterranean passageways and neutralize the threat they pose. The tunnels are well hidden, said the officer who conducted the tour, and some tunnels are booby-trapped.

1. Taking shelter at a United Nations-run school in GazaHosam Salem for The New York Times
2. Ashkelon, IsraelAriel Schalit/Associated Press
3. Funeral of an Israeli soldier in ElyakimJack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
4. Rockets being fired from the Gaza StripHosam Salem for The New York Times
5. Gaza CitySamar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
6. Mourning the death of a relative in Gaza CitySamar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
7. Petah Tikva, IsraelDan Balilty for The New York Times
8. Funeral of Hamas militants in Gaza CitySamar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

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The conflict is taking a growing toll as Israeli military strikes, Palestinian rocket attacks and street violence continue.

As violence between Israel and the Palestinians has grown this week, misinformation about the situation has circulated on Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media outlets.

The false information has included videos, photos and clips of text purported to be from government officials in the region. And the lies have been amplified as they have been shared thousands of times on Twitter and Facebook, spreading to WhatsApp and Telegram groups that have thousands of members, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

The effect is potentially deadly, disinformation experts said, inflaming tensions when suspicions and distrust are already running high.

“A lot of it is rumor and broken telephone, but it is being shared right now because people are desperate to share information about the unfolding situation,” said Arieh Kovler, a political analyst and independent researcher in Jerusalem who studies misinformation.

Israeli soldiers near the border between Israel and Gaza on Friday.Credit…Amir Cohen/Reuters

As United States and Egyptian mediators headed to Israel to begin de-escalation talks, the antagonists were weighing delicate internal considerations before agreeing to discussions on ending the violence.

But even before the mediators got to work, Israel’s caretaker prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appeared to have calculated that brute force was required first.

Early Friday, Israeli ground troops shelled Gaza — a potentially major move of escalation against the Hamas militants who have been launching hundreds of rockets at Israel.

For the Palestinians, the indefinite postponement of elections last month by the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, created a vacuum that Hamas is more than willing to fill. Hamas argues that it is the only Palestinian faction that, with its large stockpile of improved missiles, is defending the holy places of Jerusalem, turning Mr. Abbas into a spectator.

President Biden has spoken to Mr. Netanyahu and repeated the usual formula about Israel’s right to self-defense. The American leader also dispatched an experienced diplomat, the deputy assistant secretary of state Hady Amr, to urge de-escalation on both sides.

The Biden administration has resisted calls at the United Nations Security Council for an immediate discussion of the crisis, arguing that Mr. Amr and other diplomats need at least a few days to work toward a possible solution.

A proposal to convene an urgent meeting on Friday by the 15-member council was effectively blocked by the United States, diplomats said. Criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians is widespread among members of the United Nations, and the United States has often stood alone in defending Israel, its key Middle East ally.

In Washington, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, when asked about American objections to a Security Council meeting, told reporters on Thursday that “we are open to and supportive of a discussion, an open discussion, at the United Nations,” but wanted to wait until early next week.

“This, I hope, will give some time for the diplomacy to have some effect and to see if indeed we get a real de-escalation,” Mr. Blinken said.

Jordanian protesters gathered near the Israeli embassy in Amman, the capital, this week.Credit…Khalil Mazraawi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

AMMAN, Jordan — Thousands of protesters in Jordan, Israel’s western neighbor, marched toward the border on Friday morning, chanting slogans in solidarity with the Palestinians and waving Palestinian flags as Jordanian riot police surrounded them.

“We are here. Either we go down, or they will have to carry us back,” they chanted, videos posted to social media showed. “To Palestine, to Palestine. We are going to Palestine. We are going in millions as martyrs to Palestine.”

Arriving in buses and cars, the protesters called on Jordan’s government to open the border, where it has stepped up security in recent days amid the growing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Before the protesters could reach the demarcation line, however, the riot police blocked their path, social media videos and photos at the scene showed.

Jordanians have been protesting near the Israeli Embassy in Amman for several days, some of the largest expressions of solidarity for the Palestinians in a region that has otherwise reacted mildly if at all to the outbreak of violence. Protesters have called on the government to expel the Israeli ambassador.

Jordan’s 1994 treaty normalizing relations with Israel produced a chilly-at-best peace between the two countries, and the latest conflict has strained it further. This week, Jordan summoned the Israeli chargé d’affaires in Amman to condemn Israeli “attacks on worshipers” around the Aqsa Mosque compound in the walled Old City of Jerusalem, which played a major role in setting off the current conflict.

A damaged building in Petah Tikva, Israel, that was hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip.Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

There is no simple answer to the question “What set off the current violence in Israel?”

But in an episode of The Daily this week, Isabel Kershner, The New York Times’s Jerusalem correspondent, explained the series of recent events that reignited violence in the region.

In Jerusalem, nearly every square foot of land is contested — its ownership and tenancy symbolic of larger abiding questions about who has rightful claim to a city considered holy by three major world religions.

As Isabel explained, a longstanding legal battle over attempts to forcibly evict six Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem heightened tensions in the weeks leading up to the outbreak of violence.

The always tenuous peace was further tested by the overlap of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan with a month of politically charged days in Israel.

A series of provocative events followed: Israeli forces barred people from gathering to celebrate Ramadan outside Damascus Gate, an Old City entrance that is usually a festive meeting place for young people after the breaking of the daily fast during the holy month.

Then young Palestinians filmed themselves slapping an ultra-Orthodox Jew on a light rail, videos that went viral on TikTok.

And on Jerusalem Day, an annual event marking the capture of East Jerusalem during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, groups of young Israelis marched through the Old City’s Muslim Quarter to reach the Western Wall, chanting, “Death to Arabs,” along the way.

Stability in the city collapsed after a police raid on the Aqsa Mosque complex, an overture that Palestinians saw as an invasion on holy territory. Muslim worshipers threw rocks, and officers met them with tear gas, rubber tipped bullets and stun grenades. At least 21 police officers and more than 330 Palestinians were wounded in that fighting.

Listen to the episode to hear how these clashes spiraled into an exchange of airstrikes that has brought Israeli forces to the edge of Gaza — and the brink of war.

Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Israeli-Palestinian Crisis, Reignited

Rockets, airstrikes and mob violence: Why is this happening now, and how much worse could it get?A building in Gaza City on Thursday that was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike.Credit…Hosam Salem for The New York Times

GAZA CITY — The taxi was loaded with everything the family would need for Eid al-Fitr, a holiday of feasts and cookies and new clothes that Israeli airstrikes on Gaza had, even before the assault by ground forces on Friday, transfigured into a time of explosions and fear.

In their four suitcases, the al-Hatu family — mother, father, son and daughter — had made sure to pack kaak filled with date paste, the biscuits traditionally shared among friends and family during Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

But they also brought enough clothing and food for several days — no one knew when it might be safe to go back home. Until then, to try to escape the airstrikes, they were going to stay with another daughter, on Al Mughrabi Street, a five-minute drive away.

They had all agreed: It would feel safer if they were all together, said the son, Mohammed al-Hatu, 28.

They were still unloading the taxi driver’s white Skoda sedan outside their temporary home shortly before noon on Wednesday when the first drone attacked.

Mr. al-Hatu’s sister had already lugged one suitcase inside. Mr. al-Hatu, who had been carrying another, staggered into the doorway of the building, bleeding, and collapsed.

Out on the street, their father, Said al-Hatu, 65, and the taxi driver lay dead. A few yards away, their mother, Maysoun al-Hatu, 58, was alive, but desperately wounded.

“Save me,” she begged Yousef al-Draimly, a neighbor who had rushed downstairs, he recounted. “I need an ambulance. Save me.”

An ambulance came, but Ms. al-Hatu did not make it.

Less than a minute after the first strike, a second drone strike ruptured the street, killing two more men: a worker at a laundry on the block and a passer-by. Another man, a barber whose shop was next to the laundry, was so badly wounded that his leg had to be amputated.

On Thursday, the first day of Eid al-Fitr, and the fourth day of the worst conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants in years, Gaza City was silent with fear, except when it was loud with terror: the sudden smash of Israeli airstrikes, the whoosh of militants’ rockets arcing toward Israel, the shouts of people checking on one another, the last moans of the dying

Rockets launched toward Israel from the Gaza Strip on Friday.Credit…Anas Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Palestinian militants have fired some 1,800 rockets from Gaza at Israel this week, far more than in previous clashes, according to Israeli officials, who on Thursday expressed surprise at the size of the barrage and the range of some of the rockets.

Israel’s “Iron Dome” antimissile system has shot down many of the rockets, and many others have struck places where they could do little damage. But some of the rockets, which are unguided, have hit populated areas, blowing up buildings and cars and killing seven people in Israel.

The increasingly sophisticated arsenal of rockets is the primary weapon of Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza. Other groups there, like Islamic Jihad, also have them. Israeli intelligence estimates there are 30,000 rockets and mortar projectiles stockpiled in Gaza.

Hamas was believed before this week to have rockets with ranges approaching 100 miles, and many more with shorter ranges. Israel’s largest cities, Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, as well as its primary airport, Ben Gurion airport, are within 40 miles of Gaza. The airport has been closed to incoming passenger flights because of the danger, with flights diverted to Ramon airport to the southeast.

But rockets have also been fired at Ramon, more than 110 miles from the nearest part of Gaza. A Hamas spokesman said the rockets aimed at that airport were a new type that could travel 155 miles, putting all of Israel within range of Gaza. The claim could not be verified, and it was not clear how many of the new rockets the group had.

In the past, many of the rockets fired from Gaza were smuggled in from Egypt, or assembled locally from smuggled parts. But in recent years, most have been made in Gaza, with technical assistance from Iran that Hamas has openly acknowledged.