TEL AVIV, Israel — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered what he called “forceful strikes” against Hamas in response to attacks on Israeli soldiers in Gaza, throwing into doubt a U.S.-brokered ceasefire that’s held for just over two weeks.

The order to strike in the Palestinian territory came after security consultations, the Israeli leader’s office said in a Tuesday post on X. Defense Minister Israel Katz said Hamas will “pay a heavy price” for attacking Israeli soldiers and violating a promise to return the bodies of dead hostages.

The Hamas attack “is a crossing of a red line to which the IDF will respond with great force,” Katz said in a statement. An Israeli military official added that Hamas militants had attacked Israeli forces in Rafah, an area controlled by Israel as part of the truce agreement.

Soon after the announcement, The Associated Press reported that the sound of tank fire and explosions could be heard in Gaza City and elsewhere in the Strip.

Earlier, the Israel Defense Forces said Hamas is refusing to release the remains of hostages in violation of the agreement. Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the United States and European Union, said it would postpone the handing over of the remains of a dead hostage due to Israeli violations. The group rejected accusations that it’s prolonging the search operations, accusing Israel of “hindering” efforts to locate the hostage bodies.

The Hamas move and Israel’s decision to step up strikes jeopardize the ceasefire deal announced with great fanfare by President Donald Trump in mid-October. That deal paved the way for Hamas to return the last living hostages taken during the 2023 attacks that triggered the conflict. The end to hostilities was accompanied by an increase in humanitarian aid flows and is meant to lead to talks on governance and reconstruction of the war-ravaged territory.

Israel’s shekel touched session lows, falling as much as 0.4% against the dollar on the news.

A collapse would be a major blow for Trump, who has taken credit for the deal, boasted that it ended hundreds of years of conflict in the region, and repeatedly said it will hold up. Netanyahu has repeatedly said Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for the agreement, which Trump announced in mid-October to end the two-year war.

Since the ceasefire took hold, the Hamas-run health ministry said 94 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire. Several U.S. officials including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump envoy Steve Witkoff have traveled to the region in a bid to shore up the pact.

Those officials have played down violations of the ceasefire as part of a painstaking and slow process toward peace. In the region last week, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner downplayed one round of fighting, saying “a lot of people are getting a little hysterical about different incursions.”

“We always knew it was going to be fragile, always knew that Hamas has been a problem and could continue to be a problem,” U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker told Bloomberg TV’s Balance of Power on Tuesday. “We got all of the living hostages returned home and that was obviously very important moment in this dispute, this war, but we will have to watch it.”

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(With assistance from Fares Akram.)

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