Seems this latest cycle between militant rocket launches from Gaza to Israel and Israeli retaliations on Gaza started on April 23 and has been on-off ever since.
Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired dozens of rockets into Israel on Saturday drawing retaliatory air strikes, the Israeli military said, after nightly Ramadan clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police resumed in Jerusalem.
The pre-dawn exchange of fire broke months of relative quiet on the Israel-Gaza frontier.
Al-Jazeera covered it, without going into Palestinian motivations.
And so did Times of Israel which links it to the public unrest in Israel during Ramadan.
Rocket salvos fired after Hamas calls for attacks on Israel over Jerusalem unrest
Now, this apparently evolved into another set of violence, which is the larger ones we are seeing:
2021 Israel–Palestine crisis
On 6 May 2021, Palestinians began protesting in Jerusalem over a forthcoming decision of the Israeli Supreme Court regarding the eviction of four Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrah, a neighbourhood of East Jerusalem;[18] under international law, the area in question, effectively annexed by Israel, remains a part of the Palestinian territories that Israel currently holds under belligerent occupation.[19][20] The protests quickly escalated into violent confrontations between Jewish and Palestinian protesters. The following day, Israeli police stormed[21] the compound of the al-Aqsa Mosque, a major Islamic holy site.[22][23][24]
The violence coincided with Laylat al-Qadr, an Islamic day of significance, and Jerusalem Day, an Israeli national holiday. The confrontations occurred ahead of a planned Jerusalem Day march by far-right Jewish nationalists that was later cancelled.[25][26] More than 300 people were injured, mostly Palestinians,[13] drawing international condemnation. The Supreme Court ruling was then delayed for 30 days as the Attorney General of Israel, Avichai Mandelblit, sought to reduce tensions.1
On 10 May, two Palestinian militant groups, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, began firing rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip, hitting multiple residences and a school.[27][6][28] Israel launched airstrikes against Gaza, including airstrikes targeting multiple apartment buildings.[29][30][31]
Since the rocket launches and airstrikes began, at least 122 Palestinians have been killed, including 31 children, while seven Israelis have been killed, including one child.[32][33][34][35][36] On 11 May, the Israel Defense Forces claimed that at least 15 of the Palestinian casualties were confirmed members of Hamas, and also claimed that some Palestinian civilian casualties were caused by errant rocket launches within the Gaza Strip.[37] As of 12 May 2021, both Israel and the Palestinian National Authority reported injuries for at least 300 Palestinians[38][39][40] and 200 Israelis.[41]
The Guardian pinpoints Hamas' motivations more precisely to the Al-Aqsa Mosque's occupation:
The militant group Hamas has fired rockets into Israel from Gaza just minutes after the passing of its ultimatum for Israel to withdraw its security forces from the Jerusalem compound which is home to the al-Aqsa mosque, and from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in the city’s east.
But this was entirely Hamas' leadership decision to pull the trigger and this can either really driven by this particular Israeli action or they took it as a pretext is open to speculation.
Again however, why exactly now is unclear. Israeli settlement activity, against international law, is fairly frequent so why did this particular event boil over? There is going to group dynamics at the protest, local police decisions on how to suppress that protest and then a decision by Hamas to make it a reason to start launching its missiles. Without much goodwill on either side, much frustration and with apparently no great communication between Israel's leadership and Gaza's, it's fairly easy to see something escalate way out of proportion to its original cause.
