Ordered to stay indoors for another day as Israel continued its Gaza air strikes, the four young boys—all cousins, the sons of local fishermen—decided to slip out. They were on the beach, playing, when the first blast sounded. Perhaps they had been trying to forget, for a few moments, that their playground had become a war zone, that there were airplanes whizzing overhead. The captured image is the stuff of nightmares: a little boy with a shock of black hair lying face down on the sand, his legs strewn beside him in an unnatural position, waves still crashing in the distance, as if this were an ordinary scene.

There’s no escaping the sense that the real victims of the latest conflict are children—as they have been in so many other recent conflicts. The current fighting began when three Israeli teen-agers were kidnapped and murdered. A Palestinian teen-ager was subsequently dragged into a Jerusalem forest, beaten, and burned alive. At least forty-five Palestinian children have been killed. Thousands of Israeli children are finding refuge in bomb shelters on a daily basis. And then this: the bodies of the Bakr cousins, ranging in age from seven to thirteen, scattered on the beach on a summer day.

This was on Wednesday, Day Nine of the fighting in Gaza: seventeen Palestinians had been killed and a hundred and thirty-two rockets launched by Hamas at Israel. By the end of the week, the Palestinian death toll had passed two hundred and fifty, and Hamas had fired more than a thousand rockets at Israel.

Thursday began with a flurry of mixed messages: the United Nations called for a temporary ceasefire to begin on Friday, and Reuters reported that a permanent truce had been proposed by Egypt and accepted by Israeli representatives. All this came on the heels of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s oft-repeated statement during his round of Sunday talk-show interviews that the military’s goal is to achieve “sustainable quiet” for the people of Israel—a relatively modest aspiration compared to the war rumblings coming from some members of his coalition.

Then, on Thursday, thirteen Hamas militants crossed the border through an underground tunnel, and were detected outside a kibbutz near Gaza. This thwarted attempt suggests a change in Hamas strategy—from the use of rockets to the use of tunnels. As Israel’s much lauded missile defense system, known as Iron Dome, has diminished Hamas rocket capabilities, the organization has fought back with a low-tech, manual offense—the digging of tunnels leading deep into Israeli territory. This tactic is extremely hard to combat. Left unaddressed, it could allow a Hamas cell to enter Israel and attack a population center.

Before Thursday, a temporary ceasefire—known in Israel as “quiet for quiet”—had seemed possible, if unlikely, but the day ended with the rollout of Israeli tanks and the announcement of a ground operation in Gaza. Israel’s goal is to “damage the underground tunnel terrors constructed in Gaza leading into Israeli territory,” according to the defense minister, Moshe Ya’alon; fifty thousand reservists have been mobilized, and an additional eighteen thousand began to get called up overnight. Reports have come in that twenty Palestinians and an Israeli soldier were killed. A witness to the military’s bombings on Thursday told the Israeli news site Ynet that “the sky turned red tonight.”

For years, the Israeli occupation of Gaza created unconscionable strictures on movement and impoverishment, all while Israel continued to construct settlements in the area. In 2005, Israel pulled its military and citizens out of the Gaza Strip; the following year, Hamas won a free election there. Since then, Hamas has turned its iron fist on an entire population. Ten days ago, a desperately squeezed Hamas fuelled the conflict largely due to its economic woes: Israel had leaned on Qatar to freeze payments to forty thousand Hamas employees in Gaza, and the Gaza border had been sealed not only by Israel but by an Egyptian President whom Hamas considers an enemy. A temporary lull, accepted by Netanyahu on Tuesday, was brushed off by Hamas as “indicative of Israel’s weakness.” When Israel issued repeated strike warnings this week, Hamas called on Gazans who had evacuated their homes to “return to them immediately” and “not leave the house,” undoubtedly knowing that they could be killed. Hamas has declared that all Israelis are “legitimate targets” in its fight. With unemployment in Gaza of at least forty per cent and an increasingly disgruntled population, the Hamas government has proved itself an abject failure. The recent escalation can be seen as its attempt to be counted.

Apparently feeling the pressure, Hamas on Wednesday reportedly published its own set of conditions for a ten-year truce. These included the opening of border crossings, an easing of the Israeli blockade on the Gaza seaport, the release of Palestinian operatives who were freed in a 2011 swap and rearrested in the aftermath of the teen-agers’ abduction, and unimpeded entry to Palestinians wishing to pray in Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque. It was because of Israel’s rejection of these last two demands, according to a Times of Israel report, that negotiations in Cairo between the two sides and delegates from the Palestinian Authority broke down on Thursday, hours before Israel embarked on its ground operation.

School is out for the summer. The sun is beating down on Israel and Gaza. Kids are growing restless. So that they don’t have to pay with their lives for a game of hide-and-seek on a beach, so that they don’t have to duck for cover every time a siren sounds, all eyes should turn to Gaza in hopes that this conflict finally comes to an end.

Photograph by Eyad Al Baba/Anadolu Agency/Getty.