text: Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Kevin Connolly: "As Israel blamed Hamas... so Hamas in turn blamed Israel" 
   
   A truce between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza has ended amid fresh air strikes which Israel says were countering rocket fire. 
   
   Palestinian group Hamas said the wife and child of its military commander Mohammed Deif were killed in the raids. 
   
   Israel said about 50 rockets were launched from Gaza on Tuesday, but there were no injuries reported. 
   
   Talks in Cairo to end the violence broke up with no deal, and Israeli delegates said they would return home. 
   
   Trading blame 
   
   Officials say 2,016 Palestinians and 66 Israelis have died since Israel began its offensive on Gaza on 8 July. 
   
   Azzam al-Ahmad, the lead Palestinian negotiator and a senior member of the Fatah movement, blamed Israel for the failure to reach a deal. 
   
   "There was an Israeli decision to make the Cairo talks fail," he said in quotes carried by Reuters news agency. 
   
   Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Palestinian negotiator Azzam al-Ahmed accused Israel of trying to force its position 
   
   Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev: "A ceasefire has to be a two-way street" 
   
   However, Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said that rocket fire from Gaza had "made continuation of talks impossible" and "destroyed the premise upon which the talks were based". 
   
   The US has voiced concern about the renewed hostilities, and blamed Hamas, the Gaza-based Palestinian Islamist group. 
   
   "Israel has the right to defend itself against such attacks," state department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters. 
   
   Israeli officials said the first three rockets landed in open fields near Beersheba, causing no injuries. Two were intercepted over Netivot. 
   
   Later, longer-range rockets targeted Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the Israeli military said - and warning sirens have sounded around southern and central Israel. 
   
   Witnesses in Gaza reported several Israeli air strikes, from Beit Lahiya in the north to Rafah in the south. 
   
   Image copyright AFP Image caption Palestinian civilians are once against fleeing from Israeli attacks 
   
   Image copyright AFP Image caption Many have set up temporary homes in what they hope are safer areas 
   
   Image copyright EPA Image caption Israel had warned that its forces were prepared to retaliate if Gaza militants resumed rocket fire 
   
   Analysis: Sally Nabil, BBC News, Cairo 
   
   The picture was bleak even before the fighting resumed, and there was not much optimism among the members of the Palestinian delegation. 
   
   The gaps between the two parties were too wide to bridge. 
   
   The Egyptian mediators had tried to work on getting the blockade of Gaza eased without asking Hamas to lay down its weapons, a key Israeli demand. 
   
   They were keen to delay discussing the more thorny issues, like the construction of a seaport and airport in Gaza. But even that plan did not bear fruit. 
   
   Meeting deadlocked 
   
   The Israeli delegation had walked out of the Cairo meeting just hours before a midnight deadline, leaving the fate of the negotiations in question. 
   
   But even before that Azzam al-Ahmad told Reuters that there had been "no progress on any point", with big gaps remaining between the two sides. 
   
   Palestinian representatives said Israel was seeking guarantees that Hamas and other factions in Gaza would be disarmed, while the Palestinians were demanding an end to the Israeli and Egyptian blockades of Gaza, and the establishment of a seaport and airport. 
   
   Hamas insists it will not give up its weapons, while Israel wants to maintain some control over Gaza's crossings to prevent arms smuggling. 
   
   Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Smoke could be seen rising from the Gaza Strip following the breakdown of the ceasefire 
   
   Israel launched Operation Protective Edge on 8 July with the aim of ending rocket fire. It also sought to destroy tunnels dug under the frontier with Israel used by militants to launch attacks. 
   
   The Palestinian health ministry says that 2,016 Palestinians have been killed since the offensive began, including 541 children and 250 women. 
   
   The Israeli authorities say 64 Israeli soldiers have been killed, along with two Israeli civilians and a Thai national. ||||| JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli military says three rockets have been fired from the Gaza Strip, breaking a temporary cease-fire amid negotiations over the war between Israel and Hamas. 
   
   The military says three rockets landed in open fields Tuesday near the southern city of Beersheba. 
   
   Israel launched the war on July 8 to stop incessant rocket fire from Gaza. Currently, Egypt is trying to broker a longer cease-fire to end the war. 
   
   In more than a month of fighting, nearly 2,000 Palestinians have been killed, the majority of them civilians. Israel lost 67 people, all but three of them soldiers. ||||| JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli military says it has carried out a series of airstrikes across the Gaza Strip in response to renewed rocket fire. There was no immediate word on casualties from the strikes. 
   
   In a statement Tuesday, the military accused Palestinian militants of violating a cease-fire and said it maintains "both defense and striking capabilities in order to address the renewed aggression." 
   
   The airstrikes came minutes after Palestinian militants fired three rockets into Israel, breaking a temporary cease-fire and endangering negotiations in Egypt over ending a monthling war between Israel and Hamas. Authorities said the rockets landed in open areas and caused no injuries. ||||| JERUSALEM — As the latest short-term cease-fire between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip collapsed Tuesday, rockets from Gaza reached Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and Israel resumed airstrikes in Gaza. But the most telling move came in Cairo, where Israel yanked its team from talks aimed at a more durable truce. 
   
   The prospect of a negotiated and lasting peace had seemed distant from the start of the Cairo talks as each side set bottom-line goals that the other rejected. 
   
   After weeks of intermittent negotiations and fighting, analysts said that Israel’s leadership might well have considered it preferable to let the conflict continue at a low simmer and end informally rather than give concessions that could be seen as rewarding militants who fired about 3,000 rockets into Israel, penetrated its territory through tunnels, and killed 64 soldiers over a month of bloody battle. 
   
   “My approach would be not to go for any agreement with Hamas, because any agreement would give them something, and that’s a mistake,” said Dan Meridor, a former Israeli minister who served in several governments. “If the deal is seen by people as a victory for Hamas, that’s bad for us, it’s bad for the future, and bad for deterrence.” 
   
   Continue reading the main story Video 
   
   Israel’s walking away from the talks leaves Hamas — and the broader Palestinian leadership that has been negotiating in Cairo — with little to show for its war effort. Gaza is devastated: About 2,000 residents were killed, mostly civilians, and perhaps 100,000 rendered homeless as neighborhoods were reduced to rubble. 
   
   Buoyed in the Palestinian public for having achieved more militarily than in previous violent exchanges with Israel, Hamas is nonetheless under extreme pressure to deliver a tangible change to daily life in Gaza. During the war, the rising death toll put pressure on Israel. But during the cease-fire Hamas finds itself with diminished leverage, and so has resorted to threatening and provoking Israel. 
   
   It sent a flurry of rockets that reached Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and on Monday the group’s armed wing even invited a Reuters crew inside a tunnel like the ones through which it repeatedly attacked Israeli soldiers last month, showing off masked gunmen talking tough. 
   
   Muhammad Walid Tushtash, who runs a supermarket in Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp, reflected the hopes of many of his neighbors that the suffering would be compensated by Israel’s yielding to Palestinian demands for a lifting of restrictions on travel and trade. 
   
   “The definition of victory for us is when the occupation submits to the conditions,” Mr. Tushtash, 29, said in a recent interview. 
   
   The Palestinian delegation had called for a complete lifting of what it calls Israel’s siege on Gaza, the reopening of border crossings into Egypt and Israel and the building of a seaport and revival of an old airport in the crowded coastal territory. Israel demanded the demilitarization of Gaza with strict international controls to prevent the rebuilding of tunnels its troops destroyed. 
   
   As the temporary halt in hostilities was extended — from an original 72 hours last week, for five more days and then an additional 24 hours that was supposed to last until midnight Tuesday — people involved in the talks said these maximalist demands had been dropped, or postponed. 
   
   Photo 
   
   The focus was instead on more incremental changes in Israeli rules on imports and exports and on an internationally monitored rehabilitation of Gaza. For the Palestinians, it was too little and too late. 
   
   “Israel’s postponement and losing the determination to reach a final agreement is the main reason for the stalemate,” Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, said in a statement. “The occupation is wasting opportunities and should stop playing the game of time.” 
   
   Before the cease-fire broke down Tuesday evening, another Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, warned that if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel “does not understand the message and the demands of Gaza through the political language of negotiations in Cairo, we know very well the way that will oblige him to understand it.” 
   
   Hamas denied responsibility for the first round of rockets, fired before 4 p.m. local time. But by 11 p.m., it claimed credit for firing two toward Tel Aviv and two more toward Ben-Gurion International Airport, among others. The Israeli military said about 50 fell before midnight, including one on open ground in Jerusalem. 
   
   After a few hours of quiet, several sirens signaling incoming rockets sounded Wednesday morning between 6 and 7 around Ashkelon, in southern Israel. 
   
   Israel responded to Tuesday evening’s rockets with more than 25 airstrikes in Gaza, the military said, but it declined to specify targets. Witnesses said Israeli F-16 warplanes dropped at least four bombs on a Gaza City house around 9:30 p.m.; the Gaza-based Health Ministry said the strikes killed a man, a woman and a child, and injured 45 others. 
   
   “Electricity is off in the area, and a search among the rubble is going on,” said Noor Al-Dalo, 28, a relative of the homeowner. 
   
   It was unclear on Tuesday night whether the renewed exchange would lead to an escalation, given the exhaustion of the publics on both sides. Israel, which has been condemned by world leaders for the high number of civilian casualties, may be granted some leeway to respond to fire, but that would be likely to disappear if the death toll began to rise quickly. While Hamas may see little choice but to continue launching rockets, analysts said the Palestinians need a deal more than Israel does. 
   
   Azzam al-Ahmed, the head of the Palestinian negotiating team and an ally of President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, said in a late-night news conference that his delegation would also leave Cairo but that he did “not consider that we have withdrawn from the negotiations.” He blamed Israel for the failed talks, saying it did not respond to the Hamas demands. 
   
   Israelis have blamed Khaled Mashal, the exiled political leader of Hamas, and his Qatari sponsors for setting a hard line and thwarting progress. 
   
   Mr. Meridor, the former minister, and other analysts said that even without an agreement, Israel might unilaterally ease the movement of goods through its land crossings for the reconstruction of Gaza, in cooperation with Egypt and perhaps Europe. 
   
   “Israel prefers to end the war without committing itself to lifting the siege in writing,” said Mukhaimer Abusaada, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. Accusing Israel of exploiting the rocket fire as “an excuse to sabotage the talks,” he added, “A unilateral decision by Israel to gradually lift the siege will deprive Hamas of a sense of victory after this destructive war.” 
   
   Kobi Michael, a former head of the Palestinian desk at Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, said Israel’s move “weakens Hamas — it kills it softly in front of its people.” 
   
   “Israel prefers a de facto cease-fire and reconstruction in a controlled manner in coordination with the Egyptians,” said Mr. Michael, now at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “If Hamas is doomed to be a marginal player, it would prefer to be one without an agreement and not be marginal in an agreement.’ 
   
   But Sami Abdel Shafi, a Gaza-based consultant and political commentator, said Israel’s unwillingness to make concessions, and the Palestinian leaders’ lack of leverage to force them, left the people of Gaza in “potentially explosive” despair. 
   
   “The only place to look, and the appropriate place to look, is toward the international community and the United Nations,” he said. “They have to seriously step up to the plate and defuse a situation they will be seen as responsible for if they don’t come forward and push the Israeli government to recognize that people cannot be treated this way.”
target: – The temporary Gaza ceasefire was broken today when three rockets landed in Israel, its military says, per the AP; the reported attack prompted new Israeli airstrikes within minutes. The rockets landed in fields near Beersheba, southern Israel; no one was hurt, officials say. An Israeli official says the military's new strikes are targeting "terror sites," the BBC reports. The attacks came hours before the scheduled end of the current ceasefire, the New York Times notes, adding that it's not certain who was behind the latest rocket attacks.