This conflict may be harder to end than past Israel-Gaza conflicts.
But if the action on the ground has changed from past conflicts, so has the diplomatic horizon. Analysts said that political shifts among Palestinians and across the region had made the familiar paths to cease-fire agreements harder to find this time.
Hamas, financially desperate and politically isolated but rich in armaments, is desperate to score points with the public by either harming Israelis or curbing what it calls the siege that has plunged Gaza into economic and humanitarian disaster. Israel, under pressure internationally for expanding settlements in the West Bank and for the number of civilians killed, including about 65 children, in the 11-day assault on Gaza, wants mainly to disarm the militants.
“There’s a certain contradiction here,” said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli diplomat and university president. “That’s what you need mediators for — you find that magic formula, constructive ambiguity, that enables both parties to claim achievement.
“Right now, those actors are not there.”
Washington, which has helped broker previous cease-fires, is consumed with other crises, and has diminished credibility in the Middle East. Egypt, which during the brief presidency of Mohamed Morsi strongly supported Hamas, now treats the group as an enemy, and is loath to let its rivals Qatar and Turkey play a significant diplomatic role to aid residents of Gaza.
That leaves President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, an adversary of both Israel and Hamas, as the primary Palestinian interlocutor. Weak at home but increasingly active on the international stage, he shuttled from Cairo to Istanbul on Friday for what were described as cease-fire negotiations.
nytimes.com/2014/07/19/world/middleeast/israel-gaza.html
