Israeli Forces Rescue Hostage From Gaza

Israeli soldiers and special forces appear to have found Mr. al-Qadi by chance as they were combing through a tunnel network for Hamas fighters, according to two senior officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters.

Mr. al-Qadi was found alone, without guards, in a room roughly 25 yards underground, the officials said.

Israeli officials have said they believe hostages are being held in tunnels and that Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, have abductees around him.

The rescue of Mr. al-Qadi comes as pressure grows on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to make a deal to end the war in Gaza and free the more than 100 hostages remaining in Gaza, at least 30 of whom the Israeli authorities presume to be dead. Intensive diplomatic efforts by officials from the Biden administration, Egypt and Qatar have failed to bridge the gaps between Israel and Hamas, including disagreement over Mr. Netanyahu’s insistence that some Israeli troops remain in Gaza after the war ends.

It was not immediately clear whether the operation to free Mr. al-Qadi had resulted in any deaths. But there were no reports on Tuesday of intense bombardments in Gaza of the kind that had preceded other attempts to rescue hostages.

Here is what else to know:

Freed hostage: Mr. al-Qadi, who is from a village near the southern city of Rahat, was working as an unarmed guard at an agricultural plant in Magen, a small Israeli kibbutz near the border with Gaza, when he was abducted. He is a member of Israel’s impoverished Bedouin Arab minority. At least 17 Bedouins died in the Oct. 7 attacks. After his rescue, Mr. al-Qadi was taken to a hospital and was in “stable medical condition,” the military said.

Past rescues: The Israeli military has now rescued eight living hostages since the war began, and those operations have often killed scores of Palestinians. Israeli military officials say the remaining hostages are being held throughout the Gaza Strip, with many believed to be in Hamas’s underground tunnel network.

Regional fears: Hezbollah and Israel appeared to de-escalate after their major confrontation over the weekend, but for many people across the Middle East, any feelings of relief were undercut by a deeper sense of deadlock. Roughly 150,000 displaced Israelis and Lebanese are still waiting to return to their homes along the countries’ border as Israeli forces and Hezbollah continue to trade strikes. The violence there is intertwined with the 10-month war in Gaza. Months of talks have yet to yield a breakthrough.

U.N. aid resumes: The United Nations’ humanitarian aid operations in Gaza restarted on Tuesday after the Israeli military this weekend ordered the organization to evacuate its operations hub in the territory, forcing a pause. The military had said it was intensifying operations in the area to target Hamas and its remaining infrastructure.

Far-right minister: Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, drew outrage for saying he would support building a synagogue at the Aqsa Mosque complex in Jerusalem, on a disputed site that is holy to Jews and Muslims. The comments, which came in response to a radio interviewer’s question, prompted denunciations from several Arab states and led Mr. Netanyahu’s office to issue a statement saying there was no change to the status quo at the site.

Mr. al-Qadi had lost a lot of weight but had “a strong personality” that kept him afloat in captivity, Mr. al-Sana said. “He has a lot of resilience, and his faith in God was strong — those two things helped him carry it all,” he said.

Clusters of Bedouin Arab friends, relatives and well-wishers lingered in the corridors of Soroka in the southern city of Beersheba, occasionally entering and exiting the closed-off ward in which Mr. al-Qadi was recuperating.

Some were longtime family friends, like Mazen Abu Siam, a local veterinarian. Others, like Ashraf Abu Mudaygham, were complete strangers who had come hoping to congratulate Mr. al-Qadi on his return home.

“May all the hostages return soon, and this war come to an end,” said Mr. Abu Mudaygham.

Mr. al-Qadi spent over 10 months in Gaza after he was abducted during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 from the Israeli kibbutz where he worked.

“We’ve been praying for 10 months for the freedom of all the hostages, including Farhan,” said another relative, Fayez Abu Suheiban, who called on the Israeli government to take swift action to free the remaining living and dead hostages in Gaza.

“We ask the government to make a deal as soon as possible to release all the captives and end this crazy war, which has taken many victims from both sides,” Mr. Abu Suheiban said.

Dr. Abu Siam, the veterinarian, said Mr. al-Qadi told him that he had been mostly cut off from radio and television and had only a vague idea of what was going on in the outside world.

When he spoke about Hamas, which led the attacks in which Mr. al-Qadi was abducted, Dr. Abu Siam’s voice took on a harsh edge. “What they did can’t be called war,” he said.

Dr. Abu Siam ticked off a list of cases in which civilians were targeted on Oct. 7, including the killings of over 300 people at a rave in southern Israel, saying, “They attacked everyone, even people dancing under the trees.”

“All I can tell you is that all parties are still engaged, and that’s a good thing,” Kirby said. “Nobody has broken off entirely from the process.” He said that talks in Cairo in recent days “were constructive” but noted that “any negotiation is going to require compromise and leadership on both sides here, and that’s what we’re trying to drive at.”

Tens of thousands of Bedouin live in unrecognized villages in the Negev desert, an upended triangle of arid land that borders Gaza and extends through southern Israel. The villages have long suffered from a lack of basic services, including running water and electricity. When Hamas fires rockets into southern Israel, Jewish communities largely can take cover in nearby bomb shelters, while dozens of these villages lack them.

Mr. al-Qadi’s address is in Rahat, a township established by Israel, but his home is actually in an unrecognized village, according to Fayez Abu Suheiban, a relative and the former mayor of Rahat. When he was abducted, Mr. al-Qadi was working as an unarmed guard at a kibbutz in southern Israel, Mr. Abu Suheiban said.

The Bedouin were historically a seminomadic group. But in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, most were forced out of the Negev desert or fled to other parts of the region.

Israeli authorities concentrated those who remained in a smaller area of the desert, and later built seven meager townships for them, which Israeli experts said was an effort to corral a society that highly values independence into the structures of a modern nation-state. Today, there are roughly 300,000 Bedouin in the Negev, many of them under 18, about one-third of whom live in the unrecognized villages.

The Bedouin of the Negev long relied on herding sheep, goats and camels and harvesting wheat, barley and lentils, but now many have become part of the Israeli labor market, and some serve in the Israeli military. Unemployment is rampant and poverty is widespread.

Israeli officials have argued that the Bedouin do not have valid claims to the land in the unrecognized villages, and Israel’s courts have backed up that view. But Bedouin leaders have said they cannot meet demands for proof of ownership because they traditionally did not keep physical records.

“We’re citizens and we pay taxes, but the state doesn’t give us our rights because it wants to destroy our villages and concentrate us in densely populated townships,” said Atiya al-Asam, the chairman of the Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages in the Negev, a civil society group. “The state treats us in a very bad way.”

Many inhabitants of unrecognized villages rely on solar panels and batteries to turn lights on at night, run their refrigerators and watch television, and they use makeshift pipes to bring water to their homes. Homes made of corrugated sheet metal are ubiquitous — and particularly vulnerable to Hamas rockets.

“The rockets don’t distinguish between Arabs and Jews,” but “government policy does,” said Taleb al-Sana, a former member of the Israeli Parliament from a Bedouin community in the Negev.

Mr. al-Qadi’s rescue leaves three living Bedouin hostages believed to be in Gaza and a fourth who was declared dead by Israeli authorities. Two teenage Bedouin were released during a short-lived cease-fire in November, and another was one of three hostages mistakenly killed by Israeli forces in December.

In daring acts, some Bedouin saved the lives of Jewish Israelis on Oct. 7.

When Ismail Qrinawi, 45, and three other residents of Rahat heard the incessant rocket fire raining down on Israel that morning, they decided to travel to Kibbutz Beeri to rescue his cousin, who was working in the community’s food hall.

On the way, the four encountered terrified people fleeing the grounds of a music festival that had been invaded by militants, Mr. Qrinawi recalled. Without hesitation, they risked their lives to ferry dozens of them to safety in a Toyota Land Cruiser.

“We saved their lives because they’re people,” Mr. Qrinawi said in an interview. “My responsibility as a person is to save anyone I can. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Jew or an Arab.”

Shir Nosatzki, the director of Have You Seen the Horizon Lately, an organization that promotes Jewish-Arab partnership, said several survivors confirmed Mr. Qrinawi’s account to her as well as senior police officials.

Later that day, the Rahat foursome turned their focus to locating Mr. Qrinawi’s cousin. Braving gunfire all around them, they rescued him, along with a Jewish woman, too.

“The United Nations is determined to stay in Gaza to deliver life saving aid for and with Palestinian civilians,” Mr. Michaud said in a statement on Tuesday.

The Israeli military had said it was intensifying operations in the area of Deir al-Balah to target Hamas and its remaining infrastructure after intelligence reports indicating the group’s presence there.

Those military actions “seriously impact the pace at which we can deliver, safely,” Mr. Michaud noted, adding that delivering aid to the rest of the enclave was “a tremendous feat.”

In his statement, Mr. Michaud called on Israel and Hamas to respect international law and allow aid workers to operate safely. “The women and men who risk their lives to deliver humanitarian aid need a safe and consistent place from which to work,” he said.

The Israeli order to evacuate was particularly poorly timed, Mr. Michaud noted, given the mass polio vaccination campaign scheduled to begin in Gaza and “for which large numbers of staff will need to enter the strip.”

Stephane Dujarric, a U.N. spokesman, told reporters in a briefing on Tuesday that he expected the vaccination campaign to proceed as planned.

In June, a variant of the polio virus was found in wastewater in Gaza. And after the first case of the disease in 25 years was recently confirmed in the enclave, global health officials planned a mass vaccination campaign beginning on Saturday for about 640,000 children under the age of 10.

On Tuesday, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said in a post on social media that it had received four refrigerators to store vaccine doses.

Relatives of hostages in Gaza have been pressuring Netanyahu to reach a cease-fire deal with Hamas that would bring home their relatives and end the war. Some hostage families have accused him of deliberately delaying a deal and adding conditions to the negotiations as fighting in Gaza has dragged on more than 10 months.

The eighth living hostage freed in a rescue operation, Mr. al-Qadi is the first to be freed from a tunnel instead of a house and the first Arab. Unlike the other seven, Mr. al-Qadi was freed without a fight, the officials said. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss a sensitive matter.

Details of the rescue were still emerging on Tuesday evening, and there were conflicting accounts about how the rescue occurred. The officials’ anonymous accounts appeared to contradict the military’s first announcement about Mr. al-Qadi’s rescue, which a military spokesman described as a “complex rescue mission” based on “accurate intelligence.”

After The New York Times published an early version of this article, the military released a more ambiguous statement that did not refer to accurate intelligence. Instead it said Mr. al-Kadi had been rescued during an operation “in a complex underground system where hostages were suspected to be held, alongside with presence of terrorists and explosives.”

While Mr. al-Kadi may have been found by chance, the presence of hostages in tunnels is not unexpected. Hamas has held hostages in the tunnels throughout the war, and soldiers routinely search the tunnels for signs of their presence.

The Israeli military is still trying to understand why Mr. al-Qadi was discovered on his own, seemingly abandoned by his captors, the officials said.

According to a third person briefed on his rescue, the soldiers who found him initially feared that Mr. al-Qadi, a member of Israel’s Bedouin Arab minority, might be a Hamas operative, but they quickly established that he was an Israeli citizen captured on Oct. 7. The officials said that Mr. al-Qadi appeared weak and undernourished. He lacked the energy to climb out of the tunnel on his own.

Roughly 250 people were captured, some dead, during Hamas’s raid on Israel on Oct. 7. More than 100 were released in a deal in November, while scores more have died in captivity, including from Israeli fire. Roughly 100 still remain in Gaza.

The affirmation by Mr. Ben-Gvir, who has a long history of incendiary comments and actions, came amid heightened tensions in the region, with the war between Israel and Hamas expected to grind on with no end in sight. Four days of cease-fire talks in Cairo between senior Israeli and Hamas officials concluded on Sunday with no breakthrough.

Almost immediately after the interview, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement that there was no change to the status quo at the site, where two ancient Jewish temples once stood. Senior rabbis generally oppose Jews even walking on top of the Temple Mount, but some religious Jews want to build a third Jewish temple, a move seen as offensive to Muslims.

Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar quickly denounced the comments. In a joint statement, Jordan and Egypt added that a cease-fire was the only way to lessen the “grave escalation” in the region.

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it viewed Mr. Ben-Gvir’s statements as “an explicit and blatant call to demolish the mosque and construct the so-called Temple in its place.”

Moderate Israeli officials distanced themselves from Mr. Ben-Gvir’s comments. Several Israeli leaders called on Mr. Netanyahu to discipline or control Mr. Ben-Gvir.

“Challenging the status quo on the Temple Mount is a dangerous, unnecessary and irresponsible act,” Yoav Gallant, the defense secretary, wrote on X. “Ben Gvir’s actions endanger the national security of the State of Israel and its international status.”

A complex agreement governs the site. Officially, Jews may visit the site, but not pray there, though Israel has quietly allowed them to do so. Jewish worshipers are supposed to pray at the nearby Western Wall.

In one of a series of provocations, Mr. Ben-Gvir recently violated the agreement with a public demonstration, leading a group of about 2,000 supporters in prayers at the site. He claimed in the Monday interview that not allowing Jews to pray there was discrimination.

In June Mr. Ben-Gvir joined a procession of tens of thousands of Jews through the heart of Jerusalem to celebrate Israel’s capture of the eastern half of the city in 1967.

In the interview, Mr. Ben-Gvir was open about his goals — and his current limitations.

“It’s not as if I do whatever I like in the Temple Mount,” he said. “If this were the case, the Israeli flag would have hung over the Temple Mount a long time ago.’’

Many military experts have said that while Israel may be able to free some hostages through rescue operations, the only way to bring home all the living and dead hostages in Gaza is by reaching an agreement with Hamas.

The 52-year-old, a Muslim and member of Israel’s Bedouin community, is from a village near Rahat, in southern Israel. He was working as an unarmed guard in a small Israeli kibbutz, according to a member of his extended family, when he was abducted.

Israeli officials identified him variously as Qaid Farhan al-Qadi and Farhan al-Qadi; his family said his name is Farhan al-Qadi.

A member of Mr. al-Qadi’s extended family, Fayez Abu Suheiban, said in an interview that Mr. al-Qadi had over 10 children and that the entire family had been desperate to hear from him since his abduction. “We’ve been praying for him every day since,” Mr. Abu Suheiban said.

Family members had gathered at the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, a city about 10 miles southeast of Rahat, where Mr. al-Qadi was brought by helicopter. Israel’s official account on X shared a video of Mr. al-Qadi’s family members running through the hospital. It also shared a picture of him and his brother in what appeared to be a selfie.

Mr. al-Qadi looks at the camera, wearing a blue and yellow hospital gown, smiling. “Reunited,” the caption reads, with a heart emoji and an Israeli flag.

Fayez Al-Sana, a cousin who sat with Mr. al-Qadi after his release, said he was shocked by how much weight the former hostage had lost. “He came out different, he must have lost at least 20 kilograms,” Mr. Al-Sana said. He added that Mr. al-Qadi had not spoken much about his time in the tunnels, but that a significant amount of it had been spent in the dark, with only his guards for company.

Mr. al-Qadi’s brother Khatem al-Qadi told Israeli television that the family planned a huge party to celebrate his return. He called for a cease-fire deal in Gaza to allow for the release of the rest of the hostages.

“They are still waiting to see their loved ones back today,” he said, speaking of other families. “We are wishing for all of the hostages to be released and for there to be a deal now.’’

For some, Mr. al-Qadi’s rescue was a reminder of the toll the attacks took on Israel’s Bedouin community. At least 17 Bedouins died. Many more who had worked on farms in southern Israel lost their livelihoods after the farms were ransacked.

Even before the attacks, the Bedouins were suffering from the tensions between Israel and Hamas. Few have access to bomb shelters and health clinics because they often live in villages that the Israeli government does not recognize. Even though Hamas does not directly target them, Bedouins are not always able to seek shelter when the group fires rockets into southern Israel.

At the hospital, Mr. al-Qadi’s brother Khatem watched his brother step off a helicopter, Haaretz reported.

“We didn’t believe he would get out of there,” he said, according to Haaretz. “We didn’t know if he was alive or dead.”

“Today we received a new human being,” he added. “He came back from the dead.”

Gabby Sobelman, Aaron Boxerman and Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.

The operations to free hostages by force have often resulted in high death tolls in Gaza. Israeli military officials have said that only a cease-fire agreement with Hamas will allow for most of those still being held to return home.

Here is a look at some of Israel’s previous operations that freed hostages or retrieved their bodies:

Oct. 30, 2023: Less than a month after the Hamas-led attacks, the Israeli military said it had rescued an Israeli soldier who had been abducted from an army base. The soldier was identified as Pvt. Ori Megidish, 19.

Dec. 12: Two hostages were found dead and their bodies repatriated to Israel, the military said. The operation to locate them resulted in the deaths of two Israeli service members.

Dec. 15: Israeli troops shot and killed three hostages whom they mistook for Palestinian militants. The three — Yotam Haim, Samer Talalka and Alon Shamriz — had emerged shirtless from a nearby building, waving a white flag, according to the military. The shootings shocked the country and heightened fears that more captives could be unintentionally hit by Israeli fire.

Feb. 11, 2024: Israeli security forces said they had freed two hostages being held in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. The hostages were identified as Fernando Simon Marman, 60, and Louis Har, 70.

Officials in Gaza said that accompanying Israeli strikes had killed dozens of Palestinians in Rafah.

June 8: Four hostages were rescued alive from Nuseirat, in central Gaza, amid one of the most intense Israeli bombardments of the war. The hostages were identified as Noa Argamani, 26; Andrey Kozlov, 27; Almog Meir Jan, 22; and Shlomi Ziv, 41.

Palestinian health officials said 274 people were killed, including 64 children, during the rescue operation. Israel put the total number of dead at around 100. Neither toll distinguished between civilians and combatants.

The New York Times found that Israeli strikes that were part of the rescue operation had destroyed or damaged at least 42 buildings. The areas hit included apartment buildings and a crowded market, helping to explain the high death toll.

Aug. 20: Israel said it had retrieved the bodies of six hostages, five of whom were previously known to be dead.

Aug. 27: The Israeli military said it had rescued Farhan al-Qadi, 52, an Israeli Arab, during an operation in southern Gaza. He was found alone, without guards, in a room roughly 25 yards underground, the officials said.

Mr. al-Qadi, who is from a village near the southern city of Rahat, Israel, the military said, had worked as an unarmed security guard in Magen, a small Israeli kibbutz near the border with Gaza. He was abducted alongside about 250 others on Oct. 7.

Mr. al-Qadi is a member of the country’s Bedouin Arab minority and the first Israeli Arab hostage to be rescued alive since October.

The violence there is intertwined with the 10-month war in Gaza, where tens of thousands have been killed and nearly the entire population displaced. Many there are still waiting for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, as they huddle into makeshift shelters and streets torn up by Israeli bombardment. The families of the dozens of hostages still held by Hamas and its allies hope for a deal, too, to free their loved ones.

“The mission needs to be to get us home,” said Giora Zaltz, the head of a regional council in northern Israel whose kibbutz, Lehavot HaBashan, saw some residents leave after Hezbollah began firing at Israel last October.

Mr. Zaltz said Israel’s airstrikes on Sunday, which the Israeli military said had pre-empted a significant Hezbollah assault, had done little to change the balance between the two sides. For residents of Israeli border communities, he said, the situation remained frozen: roughly 60,000 Israelis displaced, even as those who stayed behind faced daily rocket fire by Hezbollah.

Israel’s focus in fighting Hezbollah has been “to blow up infrastructure or kill their commanders,” Mr. Zaltz said. But in terms of creating the conditions for displaced Israelis to return home, he added, “for now, the state and the military are failing at this.”

Tensions across the Middle East had been high for weeks after the assassinations in quick succession of Fuad Shukr, a senior leader in Hezbollah, and Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas. The Israeli military said it had killed Mr. Shukr in an airstrike but has not claimed responsibility for Mr. Haniyeh’s death, though Hezbollah and Iran — which backs both groups — vowed serious reprisals against Israel for the killings.

Israel’s predawn strikes on Hezbollah on Sunday were followed by a massive Hezbollah barrage of rockets and drones, though they caused little apparent damage. Both sides quickly declared victory and suggested they would return to what has become the new norm: endless rounds of tit-for-tat strikes. Iran, for its part, appears to have held back its vengeance — at least for now.

In Lebanon, many were relieved after both Israel and Hezbollah signaled that they would step back from all-out war. Zeinab Hourani, a graphic designer who lives in Beirut’s southern suburbs — a Hezbollah stronghold — said the nearly deserted streets were returning to life.

Ms. Hourani said she had put some of her plans on hold and had begun looking for an apartment outside the suburbs, known as Dahiyeh, fearing that Israel would target the area. But after Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, gave a speech Sunday afternoon suggesting that the clashes would be contained, “some people who left because of the tension are back,” she said.

But for the more than 100,000 Lebanese displaced from the country’s south, the conflict and disruption continue. Mr. Nasrallah has vowed to continue fighting until Israel ends its campaign against Hamas in Gaza, and months of cease-fire talks mediated by the United States, Egypt and Qatar have failed to bridge key differences between the two sides.

Fatima al-Srour, who had fled her hometown of Ramyeh, close to the border with Israel, said her father had wanted to pack up and return there after the clashes on Sunday quieted down. But she stopped him, knowing the village was still unsafe.

“We are connected with Gaza, and our return doesn’t appear to be happening soon,” said Ms. al-Srour, 35.

For Gazans, the sense of desperation is even greater as the war approaches the 11-month mark, with more than 40,000 people killed, according to the Gazan Health Ministry.

In Deir al Balah, an area of central Gaza crowded with hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians, Samih Saad waited at a field hospital hoping to receive the latest round of treatment for his leg, which he said was wounded months ago by shrapnel in a blast from a falling shell.

Many Gazans, he said, feared that an expansion of the war across the region could prolong Israel’s offensive in Gaza for months. Even if that prospect has dimmed for now, he said, most held out little hope that the cease-fire talks would succeed.

“Each time there’s a lull, we hope that it might be over soon,” he said. “But that always turns out to be mistaken.”

Humanitarian work in Gaza is coordinated with the Israeli authorities, who can slow or stop such efforts depending on security concerns in the area. The Israeli authorities were able to facilitate fewer than half of the planned humanitarian missions and movements in the Gaza Strip in the first few weeks of August, the U.N. office of humanitarian affairs said in a report on Friday, with more than half of all missions and movements blocked, delayed, impeded or canceled.

“The high number of aid missions that the Israeli authorities do not facilitate means that people who barely have the means to survive — access to clean drinking water, adequate food and shelter, to name a few — are often left with nothing at all,” Georgios Petropoulos, the leader of the U.N. office’s Gaza mission, said in a statement to The New York Times.

The Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration, an Israeli agency that coordinates humanitarian activities, did not respond to a request for comment. The Israeli military directed comments to COGAT, the Israeli body that oversees policy in the Palestinian territories and that oversees the coordination and liaison administration.

The U.N. humanitarian affairs office on Friday warned that “ongoing intense fighting, damaged roads, a breakdown of law and order and access challenges along the main humanitarian route” have led to critical food shortages in Gaza. The number of children diagnosed with acute malnutrition through arm screenings increased substantially across Gaza between May and July, it reported, noting that since January, 14,750 children ages 6 months to nearly 5 years, out of 239,580 screened, had been diagnosed with acute malnutrition.

Anushka Patil contributed reporting.

The Pentagon’s decision comes after Israel and Hezbollah fired rockets, missiles and drones at each other over the weekend. Hezbollah had responded to the bombardment of southern Lebanon on Sunday by Israeli military aircraft to stop what Israel said were preparations for a major attack by the Lebanese-based militant group.

John Kirby, the White House’s national security spokesman, said, “We’re maintaining a pretty robust force posture there to be able to defend ourselves and defend Israel should it have come to that.”

He called Hezbollah’s attack on Israel over the weekend significant enough to prompt the movement of additional American forces into the region.

“What Hezbollah launched into the early morning hours Sunday was certainly a sizable attack,” Mr. Kirby said, “different in scope than what we tend to see on a daily basis between Israel and Hezbollah. Hopefully, it won’t.”

The carrier Abraham Lincoln arrived recently in the Gulf of Oman, where the Roosevelt has been operating. The Roosevelt had been scheduled to depart this week, but General Ryder declined to say how much longer the ship would remain in the region. Another Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, said it would be about two weeks.

The Pentagon’s move comes even as Israel and Hezbollah appeared to de-escalate after firing rockets, missiles and drones at each other over the weekend, averting a wider Middle East war, at least for now. But General Ryder said the United States must take seriously vows by Iran to avenge the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, last month.

Israel’s military has not commented on the assassination. But Hamas and Iran have blamed Israel for the killing, and U.S. intelligence has assessed that Israel was behind it.

“We continue to assess that there is a threat of attack, and we remain well postured to be able to support Israel’s defense, as well as to protect our forces,” General Ryder said.

As part of a coordination between the U.S. and Israeli militaries, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, chief of the general staff of the Israeli military, met with the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., during his visit to Israel this week, the Israeli military said in a statement.

The commanders discussed security, strategic issues and strengthening regional partnerships as part of the response to threats in the Middle East, the statement said.

Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting from Tel Aviv, and Michael D. Shear from Washington.