Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Latest situation
Israel and Hamas resumed fighting on Friday, ending a week-long truce. Air raids and artillery strikes were reported in Gaza immediately after the temporary ceasefire broke down.
“Hamas violated the operational pause, and in addition, fired towards Israeli territory,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement, following warning sirens near Gaza. “The IDF has resumed combat against the Hamas terrorist organisation in the Gaza Strip.”
Hamas and other Palestinian militant factions said on Friday they had fired rockets at southern Israeli towns in retaliation for the renewed Israeli air strikes, without claiming responsibility for the earlier launches.
The Gaza health ministry said 109 people had been killed in the renewed Israeli assault, including in the southern city of Rafah.
The Israeli military plans to order Palestinian civilians from neighbourhood to neighbourhood in Gaza, clearing the way for its troops to operate in small blocks of the territory, rather than replicating its large-scale incursion in northern Gaza.
A map published on Friday by the IDF divides the besieged enclave into 620 separate blocks, ranging from the size of two football pitches to 25 square kilometres. The Israeli military has told Gaza residents to “keep following the map carefully” and move to specific places when told “to protect their safety”.
Israel’s incursion in Gaza: October – November 2023
Israel’s defence forces launched air and land offensives in Gaza after Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack in southern Israel.
Hamas killed more than 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials. The militant group, which has controlled Gaza since 2007, also seized around 240 hostages. The IDF’s response killed more than 14,800 people in Gaza, according to Palestinian officials.
A temporary truce between the two sides in late November allowed for the release of about 100 Israeli women and children and foreigners held hostage by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups, in exchange for about 240 Palestinian women and children freed from Israeli jails.
Israel’s military has been tight-lipped about how many troops it has committed to the incursion — its biggest operation in years.
But data tracking the movement of Israeli forces prior to the temporary truce showed them tightening their hold on Gaza City and surrounding al-Shifa hospital.
Satellite imagery published by Planet Labs from October 31 also showed a significant invasion.
After breaching the barrier wall in at least six places, vehicle tracks showed how Israel’s columns cut through the sparsely populated farmland to the south of the border, before making their way deeper into Gaza towards more populated areas.
Aid agencies have warned about the dire humanitarian conditions in Gaza since the war began, including a lack of water, medicine and food as well as insufficient fuel to keep hospitals and communications networks running.
The temporary ceasefire had allowed humanitarian convoys into Gaza, with trucks carrying aid and fuel entering through the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza, according to the UN.
Gaza’s sole power plant went offline on October 11 after it ran out of fuel, with the outage captured by night-time satellite imagery.
Satellite data shows the toll the war has taken on Gaza’s infrastructure and homes, with much of the Palestinian enclave’s north in ruins and entire neighbourhoods destroyed.
Hamas’s attack on Israel: October 7 2023
As much of Israel slept, Hamas militants launched an unprecedented, multipronged dawn assault on the country from the Gaza Strip. The Middle East’s most powerful security force was caught off guard.
Launched on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, the assault began in the early hours with thousands of rockets fired at Israeli towns and cities. The barrage set off warning sirens across the south and centre of the country, sending citizens fleeing to air-raid shelters.
Israel’s military said Gaza-based militants launched more than 4,500 rockets over the weekend. Many were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defence system, but satellite imagery showed fires and plumes of black smoke rising from some locations that had been hit.
Hundreds of Hamas fighters simultaneously attacked by land, air and sea, repeatedly breaching the fortified barrier between Gaza and Israel.
Images and videos showed motorbikes carrying armed militants riding through a hole in a wire fence along the border and a bulldozer destroying part of the barrier. Bombs, rockets and drones could also be seen blowing up the fence as well as defensive positions.
Militants used motorised paragliders to attack the Supernova music festival, not far from the Gaza border, flying in and turning the two-day rave into the site of a massacre.
Gunmen chased young Israelis across the desert, shooting and snatching people to take back to Gaza as hostages. The Israeli military failed to respond for hours, apparently caught by surprise by the attack. Hundreds of bodies have been recovered from the site.
After breaching the Gaza fence, armed Hamas fighters began targeting Israeli communities at several locations, going door-to-door and taking hostages.
Images and video show people lying dead in the streets after execution-style killings and residents including women, children and the elderly being taken away.
The Hamas militants also attacked Israeli military sites.
More than 1,200 Israeli civilians and troops were killed, the IDF said — making it the deadliest attack on the country since its foundation.
The complexity of the assault by Hamas was unlike anything Israel has witnessed in decades. It raised serious questions about the security service’s intelligence gathering and the military’s preparedness for an attack.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu imposed a “complete siege” on Gaza on October 9, calling up a record 300,000 reservists and ordering the strip to be pounded from the air.
Israel’s military also ordered the evacuation of 42 communities along its northern border, where Israelis have died in cross-border fire that Israel blamed on Hizbollah or Lebanon-based Palestinian factions — part of the Iran-backed “Axis of Resistance”.
Visual and Data team: Janina Conboye, Peter Andringa, Steven Bernard, Chris Campbell, Sam Joiner, Lucy Rodgers and Alan Smith