JERUSALEM — The Israeli military said on Monday that it had paused operations during daylight hours in parts of the southern Gaza Strip, as a new policy announced a day earlier appeared to take hold amid cautious hopes that it would allow more aid to reach residents of the beleaguered territory.

Aid workers said they hoped that the daily pause in the Israeli offensive would remove one of several obstacles to delivering aid to areas in central and southern Gaza from Kerem Shalom, an important border crossing between Israel and Gaza.

The policy applies to only to a 7-mile stretch of road in southern Gaza, and not to areas in central Gaza to which hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians have fled since the Rafah invasion began.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dissolved his wartime Cabinet, an Israeli official said Monday, after the departures of two key members prompted demands from far-right politicians for representation in the influential group.

The two members, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, quit Netanyahu’s small wartime Cabinet last week amid disagreements over the direction of the war in the Gaza Strip. The men, both former military chiefs, had been seen as voices of moderation in the body, which was formed in October after the Hamas-led assault on Israel and made many decisions about the conflict.

The Israeli official suggested that Netanyahu’s decision to disband the body — which was communicated to ministers at a wider Cabinet meeting Sunday — was largely symbolic given that Gantz and Eisenkot had already resigned.

Since their departures, discussions about the war have been driven by Netanyahu in conjunction with his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and close advisers, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

Dissolving the wartime Cabinet formalizes that process. It may also defuse calls from Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners who might have hoped to fill the places of Gantz and Eisenkot.

According to Eisenkot, the influence of one of those far-right leaders, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, had long loomed over the wartime Cabinet’s discussions. After Gantz resigned, Ben-Gvir immediately demanded to join the group, writing on the social platform X that it was “about time to take brave decisions, achieve true deterrence, and bring true safety to the residents of the south, north, and all of Israel.”

Israeli news outlets reported Monday that Netanyahu’s move to disband the wartime Cabinet was a direct response to that demand.

For now, major decisions about the war in Gaza — such as whether to agree to a cease-fire with Hamas — will still be put to a separate, broader security Cabinet. That group includes Ben-Gvir and another far-right member, Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister. Both have argued that Israel’s military offensive in Gaza must continue until Hamas is destroyed.

What remains unclear is how the end of the wartime Cabinet will affect future aid deliveries to Gaza.

When Israel invaded Rafah in early May, the move led to the closure of the lone supply route between Egypt and Gaza, at Rafah.

The closing of the Rafah border and fighting around it have forced aid groups and commercial vendors to route more of their convoys through Israel, where trucks enter Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing point. Once the food is inside Gaza, humanitarian organizations transfer it to their own vehicles and distribute it. Those groups say that Israel does too little to ensure the safety of those delivering aid, citing attacks on aid convoys and workers, including Israeli airstrikes.

Israel regularly says that there are no limits on the amount of aid it allows to enter Gaza and blames disorganized aid groups — as well as theft by Hamas — for the failure to move food from Israeli to Palestinian control.

But prosecutors at the International Criminal Court have accused Israeli leaders of restricting aid delivery, seeking their arrest on charges including the use of starvation as a weapon of war. And aid groups said the fighting near the Kerem Shalom crossing made it even harder for aid groups to collect the food from the border and then distribute it onward through Gaza.

“Before Rafah, we had free access to Kerem Shalom basically all day, every day,” said Scott Anderson, the deputy Gaza director for UNRWA, the lead United Nations agency for Palestinians. “Now we still have access, it’s just a little more nuanced and difficult to get there,” he added, citing frequent gunfire and explosions in areas traversed by aid trucks.

“What we had asked for was windows to access Kerem Shalom without having to coordinate so closely with the IDF — to be able to come and go, and the trucks to come and go, with more freedom,” said Anderson, using the initials of the Israel Defense Forces.

That led to the new Israeli policy of avoiding combat in daylight hours.

The military said Monday that it had killed more than 500 combatants in Rafah, severely reducing the capacity of two of Hamas’ four battalions in the city. The remaining two battalions were operating at a “medium level,” the military said.

Though humanitarian groups welcomed the pause, they said far more still needed to be done.