UpdateWife and son of Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif die in Gaza air strike

Israeli air strikes killed 11 Palestinians in Gaza, including the wife and infant son of Hamas’s military leader, Mohammed Deif, in what the group said on Wednesday was an attempt to assassinate him after a ceasefire collapsed.

Accusing Israel of opening a “gateway to hell”, Hamas fired rockets at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The attacks caused no casualties but demonstrated the Islamist movement could still bring the Gaza war to Israel’s heartland despite heavy Israeli bombardments in the five-week-old conflict.

Israel’s military said it had carried out 60 air strikes on the Gaza Strip since hostilities resumed on Tuesday, and that Palestinians launched more than 80 rocket salvoes, some intercepted by the Israeli anti-missile Iron Dome system.

The violence shattered a 10-day period of calm, the longest break from fighting since Israel launched its Gaza offensive on July 8 with the declared aim of ending Palestinian rocket fire into its territory.

The Palestinian Health Ministry says 2,029 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the Gaza Strip. Israel says it has killed hundreds of Palestinian militants in fighting that the United Nations says has displaced about 425,000 people in the territory of 1.8 million.

Sixty-four Israeli soldiers and three civilians in Israel have also been killed in the most deadly and destructive war Hamas and Israel have fought since Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, before Hamas seized the territory in 2007.