TEL AVIV—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered “forceful” strikes in the Gaza Strip after Israel alleged that Hamas violated the cease-fire.

Hamas shot at troops who are stationed in Israeli-controlled territory in southern Gaza, a military official said, calling it a violation of the cease-fire. One soldier was hit.

It was the second time Israel accused the U.S.-designated terrorist group of violating the cease-fire on Tuesday. Earlier in the day, Israel said Hamas had returned additional remains of a hostage whose body had previously been recovered from Gaza. The military also released drone footage it said showed Hamas staging the recovery of the body.

The militant group said the Israeli claims were pretexts to restart the war and said it had no connection to the shooting in southern Gaza. It said that Israel was preventing the entry of heavy equipment needed to retrieve bodies buried under rubble. The armed wing of Hamas, Qassam Brigades, said it was prepared to hand over another body of a deceased hostage discovered in a tunnel but had to postpone the handover because of what it said were Israeli violations of the deal.

The Israeli government gave the U.S. advance notification of the attacks, a U.S. official said. The official said that the U.S. expected the strikes to be targeted and that Israel wasn’t looking to upend the cease-fire.

“The cease-fire is holding,” Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday when asked about the incident. “That doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be little skirmishes here and there.”

Netanyahu’s critics in Israel have accused him of turning over Israeli security to the U.S. Senior Trump officials have arrived in Israel since the cease-fire went into effect to monitor the truce brokered by President Trump. Around 200 U.S. troops have been stationed in a civil-military American coordination center in southern Israel to oversee the fragile cease-fire.

“At the end of the day we have to be coordinated with the Americans. This has a price,” said Eliezer Marom, a former commander of the Israeli Navy. “The price is that we can’t act forcefully when we see violations by Hamas,” he said, adding that the U.S. wants to ensure that Israeli responses are proportional to violations so they don’t collapse the cease-fire.

Since the cease-fire deal went into effect, Hamas has tried to re-establish itself as a force in Gaza, instigating a violent crackdown against its rivals. Its attacks against Israeli troops send a message that it has no plans to disarm or give up a role in Gaza’s future .

This isn’t the first time the cease-fire has been tested. Last week, Israel conducted dozens of airstrikes across Gaza after it said militants shot and killed two troops inside the so-called yellow line that demarcates Israeli-controlled territory. The U.S. official said Israel also notified the U.S. about that round of strikes. After the flare-up in fighting, the two sides said they were both committed to continuing the cease-fire.

But the skirmishes underscore how fragile the deal is, with each side accusing the other of dozens of violations of the agreement. They demonstrate the challenges for the next steps in the deal, which call for Hamas to disarm and for an international force to help stabilize Gaza.

Under the terms of the deal, Hamas was required to release 28 hostage bodies but has only returned 15 so far. Hamas says that the fighting and destruction in Gaza have made it difficult to retrieve the bodies.

The text of the cease-fire agreement acknowledges that the retrieval of all the hostage bodies will take time. Israel says Hamas has been purposefully slow to return the bodies of deceased hostages and has dismissed Hamas’s claims that it is struggling to retrieve them.

Forensic testing in Israel found that remains returned to Israel on Monday night belonged to Ofir Tzarfati, a hostage who was killed on Oct. 7, 2023. Some of his remains were retrieved by Israel in a previous rescue mission earlier in the war.

“We thought we had closed the circle, that we were able to lay Ofir to rest, but today we discovered we never received all of him,” said his mother, Rishel Tzarfati. “I can’t grasp this. How can you bury your child in installments?”