After nearly two weeks of fighting, the outline of a ceasefire may be emerging. But there is no telling where the stumbling diplomacy may lead

DESPAIR quivered in Muhammad al-Majdalawi's voice as he described the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, four days after Israeli troops had entered the territory. “The soldiers are 500 metres from my house,” he said. “Three children in my neighbourhood were killed last night. The walls in my house are shaking. Every minute there are explosions, every minute there are martyrs. We can't sleep, we can't move, we have almost no food, no electricity, and it's very cold.” He spoke hurriedly, afraid that his mobile phone would run out of power.

The death toll of Palestinians has risen inexorably. Twelve days after the Israeli offensive began, Palestinians put the number at more than 770, with at least 2,500 wounded. Israel claims to have killed more than 130 Hamas fighters. Some medical sources in Gaza say that as many as 40% of the dead are women and children, and that a large majority have been non-combatants. Several entire families have been wiped out. On January 4th Gaza's main vegetable market was hit: five people were killed, 40 wounded. Two days later a school run by the United Nations in the Jabaliya camp was shelled, leaving at least 30 dead. Nearly all were children. Gazans have long felt they lived in an open prison; now they are trapped in a shooting gallery.

The health services are flagging. Eighteen months under siege had already drained hospitals of medicine and working equipment. Now fuel for the generators has nearly run out. Exhausted and demoralised staff struggle to find space for the wounded and the dead.

Since the operation started on December 27th, Israel has hit more than 1,000 targets from sea and air, including roads, government buildings, mosques, police stations, smuggling tunnels, rocket launchers and the Islamic University. Seven Israeli soldiers have been killed, four by errant Israeli tank fire. Hamas attacks on Israel have been reduced to about 30 rockets a day; four Israeli civilians have died since the start of the war. Israeli forces have so far stayed outside the main urban areas of Gaza. So Hamas may still claim to have won, or at least not lost, the battle.

The Israelis say their strikes have targeted only Hamas; they claim that the university, for instance, housed a Hamas laboratory. There is no doubt, however, that the bombardment has hammered the civilian infrastructure. The sole power plant has been shut down. Of Gaza's 1.5m people, two-thirds lack electricity and nearly half have no running water. Raw sewage is spilling into the streets, risking epidemics. Most of the petrol stations in Gaza are closed. Diesel fuel, which used to be smuggled from Egypt through tunnels that have been bombed, is no longer available on the black market. Cooking gas and heating fuel are scarce. In a cold winter, many families leave their windows open for fear of shattering glass from explosions. People drag mattresses to the middle of their rooms and huddle together to keep warm.

The UN's World Food Programme gives warning of a looming crisis. Flour, rice, sugar, milk, canned food and fresh meat have nearly run out. Another UN agency says that fewer than 20 bakeries are still working. Hundreds of people queue outside those that still sell bread. One man waited for five hours, only to buy one packet of pitta bread to feed his large family for a day. Others are living on stale bread and tea, heated on fires made out of pieces of wood and cartons collected on the street.

When the electricity supply briefly comes back on, people rush for their phone chargers. Once plugged in, they turn on their televisions and, if they are rich enough to have computers, check their e-mails or contact relatives on Skype. For a moment they feel less isolated. But soon there is yet another blackout, and darkness falls again.

What Israel wants

As the casualties mount, Israel is increasingly obliged to justify its tactics. Why, for example, did it shell the UN school, which had been assigned as a temporary refuge, and whose GPS co-ordinates had been given to the Israeli army? Because, officials said, Hamas fighters and a mortar crew had been spotted just outside it, and the building itself was booby-trapped or housed explosives. (The UN hotly denies this.) Israel also leaked intelligence information purporting to show that senior Hamas fighters and politicians were holed up in a warren of underground chambers under Shifa Hospital, the main health-care centre in Gaza City. Israeli spokesmen said Hamas deliberately and cynically operated close to civilians. Hence the number of children killed in the fighting.

But the alarming increase in the number of civilians among the Palestinian dead has jolted Israeli policymakers. They remember 1996, when an Israeli sweep against Hizbullah in southern Lebanon ended peremptorily when shells killed more than 100 civilians. Rather than withdraw from Gaza, where the fighting has so far been inconclusive, Israel is now poised to send in units of reservists (see article). This would signal a determination to destroy Hamas's strongholds completely.

The possibility of a wider ground war has spurred outside efforts to broker a ceasefire. In the vacuum of the American presidential transition, a trio of European foreign ministers (plus a brace of leading Eurocrats) have been trying to fill the diplomatic gap by shuttling around the Middle East. At the same time France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has been engaged in a one-man peace mission. The Europeans all carried—more or less—the same message: a call for an immediate halt to military action by Israel, matched by an unconditional ending of rocket attacks by Hamas. All that was backed by an offer of renewed European help to oversee security at Rafah, Gaza's border crossing into Egypt. This is the Gaza Strip's only opening to the outside world that does not depend solely on Israel.

Israel is holding out for ceasefire terms that would guarantee an end to arms smuggling across or under Gaza's border with Egypt. The border has never been made watertight, though the Egyptians are at present keeping it closed except for a trickle of medical aid. After meeting Mr Sarkozy on January 6th, Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak repeated the French president's calls for a ceasefire and agreed to discussions about how to police the border. The two then put their proposal to the UN. This is Mr Mubarak's first public signal that he could co-operate once again with the Americans to create a border-crossing regime that might satisfy Israel.

According to Israeli sources, this would involve American engineers and other civilians helping Egyptian forces to ensure that the ground below the border is not again honeycombed with tunnels. The Americans would use sophisticated technology to detect new digging. Above-ground fences would be strengthened and Egypt would sharpen its intelligence in the Sinai Peninsula to spot and stop arms-smugglers. The outgoing American secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, welcomed Egypt's plan at the UN Security Council. “When this ends,” she said, “there must be new arrangements in place, not a return to the status quo ante.”

Mr Mubarak has publicly blamed Hamas for the violence and is keen to prevent it from boasting of a victory. And he is loth to admit that Hamas's missiles have come into Gaza via Egypt. The Egyptian government is jealous of its sovereignty in Sinai, the desert east of Gaza, but may now be ready to accept limited help from outside.

Mediators in Jerusalem and Ramallah, the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority (PA) that is still run by the Fatah group, Hamas's rival for supremacy among the Palestinians, are trying to arrange a new border regime. They envisage somehow restoring PA border guards—in fact, Fatah soldiers or police—at the Rafah crossing. They would act alongside Egyptian officers, probably reinforced by returning monitors from the European Union.

A long-established division of labour in the Middle East supposed that America would deliver Israel, in the event of a long-lasting peace deal, and the EU (the largest donor of aid to the Palestinians) would deliver the Palestinian side. But the EU does not talk directly to Hamas. It is on its list of terrorist organisations. Besides, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has asked Europeans not to talk to it, for fear of undermining the PA's claims to represent all Palestinians. And direct talks with Hamas might damage the EU's credibility as a peace-broker with Israel.

Some EU officials say that if a credible ceasefire deal is on offer, the EU will find ways of reaching understandings with Hamas. The EU's foreign-policy chief, Javier Solana, maintains a channel of communication through Omar Suleiman, the head of Egyptian intelligence. Dropping in on President Bashar Assad of Syria on January 6th, Mr Sarkozy asked him to use his influence to help all sides “return to reason”.

If the diplomacy succeeds and the fighting stops, the Israeli government will claim that “Operation Cast Lead” has dealt a telling blow to Hamas and sent a powerful message of deterrence and determination to the wider region. The Gaza campaign has enjoyed support across the political spectrum, except among the Arab-Israeli parties. Most peace-minded Israelis see Hamas's missiles, with their increasing range, as a real threat to the state, not because of the limited damage and disruption they cause but because their incessant drizzle from across Gaza's border has begun to make the prospect of a two-state solution, with Israelis and Palestinians living side-by-side in peace, seem untenable.

As Israel's general election (due on February 10th) approaches, Ehud Barak, the defence minister who leads the Labour Party, and Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister who leads Kadima, the other main party in the ruling coalition, will both argue that the assault on Hamas in Gaza will make it easier for them—and more urgent—to forge peace with the Fatah-run PA. Mr Barak will add, of course, that it was he who planned and ran so successful a military campaign.

But will Hamas budge?

Hamas, meanwhile, has proved remarkably consistent in its aims. True to its name, derived from the Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement, its strategy has been simply to keep the flame of resistance to Israel burning, with the ultimate goal of recovering all of historic Palestine.

Until the party contested Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, and won, Hamas had conceded dominance of state institutions to its older, secular and nationalist rival, Fatah. Once it won the election and found the world, led by America, seeking to isolate it and showering aid and arms on Fatah, divisions between the parties naturally widened: to the point where the Islamists, in the summer of 2007, evicted Fatah from Gaza, leaving it in charge only of the rump Palestinian proto-state in the West Bank.

With its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, Israel had sought to wash its hands of the crowded, increasingly radicalised territory. Yet it retained control of Gaza's borders, airspace and supplies of water and power, while continuing to hold thousands of Palestinian prisoners, and continuing to expand its settlements on the West Bank. So while Israel professed outrage at Hamas's lobbing of rockets from Gaza, which had killed precisely one Israeli between July and the start of the present Israeli onslaught, the group's supporters countered that they were simply exercising a right to “resist” this new mutation of Israeli occupation.

AFP

Too hard a lesson

After its 2007 victory, Hamas consolidated its hold over Gaza. The mounting blockade by Israel, with American support and Egyptian acquiescence, was intended to force it to accept Israel's right to exist and to renounce violence; but Hamas refused to bend. Its leaders believed that Israel could not blockade Gaza for ever in the face of growing global concern. In particular, they reckoned that Egypt, as a Muslim and Arab neighbour, would eventually succumb to public outrage at its complicity in the siege. But Egypt's rulers proved unexpectedly stubborn; not merely because they loathe Islamists, but because they feared, perhaps rightly, that Israel had intended all along to foist Gaza and its troubles onto them, perpetuating the truncation of the putative Palestinian state. This is why they have insisted that the border will open only in accordance with an old protocol that would let the Fatah-dominated PA, and not Hamas, control the crossing.

Hamas remains committed to the immediate aim, beyond a ceasefire, of forcing an end to the siege, preferably by obliging Egypt to open its border. Such an opening would, it hopes, not only allow for a free flow of aid, but would also amount to a tacit recognition of Hamas's legitimacy as Gaza's government. In the long run, perhaps, that may be translated into some kind of legitimacy in the West, too.

But in the meantime Hamas's fighters will continue to battle on, calculating that every day they continue to hold out, their cause gains strength. For the time being, divisions within the movement have been healed, the carnage caused by Israel is making them popular, and they are still able to strike back. On January 6th a Hamas missile hit the town of Gedera, just 20 miles from Tel Aviv, the farthest one has ever reached.

Arab dilemmas

For Arabs, the pain of watching Gaza's agony is double. This is not just because Palestinians are their kin. It is because they have seen it all before, generation after generation, in place after place, and have been able to do very little to relieve the suffering.

Arab delays and difficulties over Gaza stem from a broader regional split that has pitted a “resistance” faction, including Iran, Syria and their militia allies, Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, against such Western-backed, pro-peace-with-Israel governments as those of Egypt, Jordan, the rump PA on the West Bank, and Saudi Arabia. These governments hope for Hamas's defeat; the resisters hope, if not for an unlikely Hamas victory, then at least for Gaza's rulers to survive, as proof that Israel cannot simply smash all its enemies into submission. On January 8th rockets were fired into Israel from Lebanon, either by Hizbullah or Palestinian fighters.

But there is hardly an Arab city of any size that has not witnessed noisy protests, directed not only against Israel or America, but also against Egypt. As demonstrators in Berlin hurled shoes at the Egyptian embassy, an online poll run by al-Jazeera, the most-watched Arab TV channel, revealed that 94% of respondents believed some Arab governments were complicit in Israel's attack.

Such feelings have now galvanised even those who had hoped to see Hamas punished. Hence the decision, by Egypt and France, jointly to float their ceasefire plan at the UN. Most governments, including the Bush administration, immediately endorsed the proposal.

Yet it remains unclear whether the actual belligerents will accept it. Israel, though responding “favourably” to the UN initiative and saying it has agreed on the “principles” of a truce, is still debating how far it is prepared to go in its efforts to crush Hamas. And Hamas leaders, though desperate for a ceasefire, will balk at any deal that reeks of capitulation.

Meanwhile Barack Obama, America's president-elect, has remained deafeningly silent, refusing to take sides, though his friends say he will leap into the diplomatic fray the moment he takes office. Israel may want to finish the military job in Gaza before he does so.