What happened
The immediate trigger predated any rocket fire from Gaza: pending Israeli Supreme Court eviction cases against Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah, combined with Israeli police storming al-Aqsa Mosque compound during Ramadan prayers using tear gas and rubber bullets inside the mosque itself, produced weeks of escalating tension in Jerusalem before Hamas began firing rockets on 10 May, citing the events in Jerusalem as its justification. Israel responded with an air campaign in Gaza, and this 11-day war — occurring under the brief, fragile Bennett-Lapid coalition that had not yet even formed (the actual coalition took office the following month; this operation happened under a caretaker Netanyahu government during the coalition's formation talks, though it is recorded in the subsequent government's period for narrative continuity with the coalition it helped enable) — followed the now-familiar pattern of large civilian casualty disparities.
HRW's investigation of the al-Shati strike specifically found no evidence of a legitimate military target at the residential building struck, which killed eight members of a single extended family including six children, and concluded the strike may have violated the laws of war either through a targeting error or through disregard for civilian presence. This period also saw serious intercommunal violence inside Israel itself, with mob attacks by both Jewish and Arab Israeli citizens against each other in several mixed cities — a dimension of the crisis that received less international attention than the Gaza casualty figures but which Israeli commentators across the political spectrum described as some of the worst domestic ethnic unrest in the country's history.