HOW quickly the tables have turned. Only three months ago Hamas, the Palestinians’ Islamist movement that rules Gaza, was celebrating the end of an eight-day bombardment by Israel during which its fighters had responded defiantly with rockets that hit Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Israel killed over 170 Gazans for the loss of six of its own people but then, under mediating pressure from the United States and Egypt, agreed to ceasefire terms that provided for all of Gaza’s crossings into Egypt and Israel to be opened. Gaza’s Islamists hailed the war as a triumph. The siege that they had suffered since 2007 would, they declared, at last be lifted.

But it has not been—at least not entirely. So disillusion has returned. Though Israel has narrowed the buffer zone surrounding the strip, giving Gazan shepherds more grazing for their flocks and letting Gazan fishermen sail a further three miles out to sea, the ceasefire has not ended the violence either. Since November, Israel has killed four Palestinians and wounded 66. Israel’s tanks have rolled into Gaza or its snipers have fired on average once a day since the ceasefire. Hamas has managed to stop its militants and those of the smaller and more extreme Islamic Jihad group from launching any rockets into Israel—until late last month, after the death of a Palestinian prisoner in Israeli custody, which prompted them to fire three rockets into Israel. The Israelis retaliated by cutting off Gaza’s already tightly controlled flow of supplies through the crossings.

Worse for the Gazans, Egypt’s government recently took unusually severe measures to stop goods, including all the strip’s fuel needs and much of its material for building, being transported through tunnels under its border. Since late January, Egyptian army engineers have flooded the warren of tunnels with sewage, demolishing dozens of them. Attempts by some of Gaza’s tunnel operators to shoot at Egypt’s soldiers have prompted further reprisals; some goods have been impounded. Traffic has slumped from 2,500 or so tonnes coming through the tunnels every day to barely 300, says a trader. So prices in Gaza are rising and building at some sites has ceased.

Hopes among Gazans that Egypt’s Islamist government was merely trying to convince Western ones that it would not pander to its friends in Hamas have begun to recede. Egypt’s court has authorised the demolition of all tunnels on national-security grounds. Hamas supporters, overjoyed when their ideological bedfellows, the Muslim Brothers, won Egypt’s presidential election last June, are aghast that, in power, the Brothers have ceded control of Gaza’s borders to Egypt’s security forces.

Some people in Gaza predict a resumption of the violence of last August, when 18 Egyptian soldiers were killed near the border where Egypt, Gaza and Israel all meet. One reason for the Egyptians’ hostility to Hamas is that they are worried that jihadist militants making mayhem in the Sinai desert may co-operate with like-minded people in Gaza. Gleeful Israeli soldiers say that their co-ordination with their Egyptian counterparts at the border is better than under Hosni Mubarak’s old regime.

In desperation, some Hamas men are looking to Israel to let Gaza freely export its produce, reopen its port, and allow its businessmen and labourers to cross the buffer zone, as they did before Hamas took over in 2007. The longer the ceasefire, the more Israel has eased the flow of trade. But for Hamas this is a mixed blessing. Overland traffic only partially compensates for the shortfall through the tunnels. It also makes Hamas more dependent on—and subservient to—Israel, to ensure vital supplies continue. Hamas’s security forces have begun acting on Israeli intelligence passed via Egypt about wayward militants planning attacks, say Western officials.

Don’t mention the Jews

Egypt’s tunnel squeeze has hurt Hamas’s finances as well as its morale. Import duties on tunnel traffic brought Hamas more than $180m a year and paid for its 40,000-strong civil service. Hamas is trying to make up for lost income from the tunnels by putting an extra levy of 200 shekels ($54) per lorry on goods from Israel.

Unable to get the siege fully lifted and nervous about grumblings that the movement is veering towards normalisation with Israel, Hamas may be turning intolerantly inwards again. Some leaders are resorting to more virulent Islamist language in order to fend off the charge of truckling to Israel. This week the UN cancelled a marathon race in Gaza after Hamas banned women from running beside men and insisted that they cover their legs. Hamas may let young cadres revive a morality campaign that had previously lapsed.

Such actions will do little to endear the Islamists to Gazans tired of conflict, isolation and factional rivalry. Some Gazans have set fire to themselves in the hope of sparking a Tunisia-style uprising. A recent protest rally, where men and women mixed freely, was Gaza’s largest ever.