AS ISRAEL’S campaign to destroy the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, or at least to defang it, proceeded into its tenth day, the death toll continued to rise. By July 17th more than 220 Palestinians were reported to have been killed and at least 1,600 wounded. The UN said that a quarter of the victims were children and over three-quarters civilian. More than 560 houses, including many belonging to Hamas people, had been destroyed and thousands damaged, said the UN. In one instance, 17 members of the family of a Gazan police chief were killed when his house was targeted. The home of Mahmoud Zahar, a founder of Hamas, who is in hiding, was reduced to rubble.

Water and electricity supplies across the Gaza Strip, patchy at the best of times, were cut off. Basic food and medicine were running short for the territory’s 1.8m people, crammed into a narrow coastal enclave only 41km (25 miles) long. At least 20,000 Gazans sought refuge in schools run by the UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians, better known as UNRWA. Warning of more bombings to come, the Israelis advised 100,000 Gazans to leave their homes or risk being hit by missiles.

For its part, Hamas has continued to fire rockets and mortar shells into Israel. By July 17th, together with fellow militant groups, it had loosed off more than 1,200, according to the Israelis, killing just one Israeli. But Israeli citizens are more alarmed by Hamas’s weaponry than the last time Israel hammered the movement in Gaza, in November 2012, with a similar eight-day assault from the air. Most of Hamas’s rockets are still home-made devices which rarely cause lethal damage, but a stockpile of more sophisticated weapons has been built up, some with a range of 160km, smuggled in via Iran and Syria.

Of the 11,000-odd rockets and missiles that Israeli intelligence reckons that Hamas and other militant groups possessed at the start of Operation Protective Edge, as Israel calls its current campaign, about 600 have a range of 75km, putting Tel Aviv under threat. Perhaps another 100 exceed 100km. This brings all of Israel’s biggest cities within Hamas’s reach, including Haifa and Jerusalem, where sirens have gone off in the past week. Hamas now also has drones.

Despite its ferocious drubbing by the Israelis, there has been no sign that Hamas is inclined to give up the battle soon, though both sides agreed to a five-hour ceasefire on July 17th. When Israel’s government offered a previous ceasefire through the good offices of Egypt on July 14th, Hamas’s leaders in their bunkers in Gaza and in hotels across the Middle East said no. During a six-hour respite when Israel held back, Hamas continued defiantly to fire rockets. Israel’s air force then resumed its assaults with renewed intensity. By some estimates, Hamas may run out of rockets, thanks to Israeli action and to exhausting its supply, within around three weeks.

Meanwhile, Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, pondered his next steps amid conflicting advice from left and right at home and from an array of governments abroad. Some of his coalition allies, particularly those on the hawkish right, such as Avigdor Lieberman of the Israel Our Home party, urged him to send in troops on the ground to “finish the job”. On July 15th he sacked his belligerent deputy defence minister, Danny Danon, who criticised him for his supposed defeatism. Mr Netanyahu also kept his economy minister, Naftali Bennett, who is the leader of another chunk of the coalition and also keenly favours a ground invasion, out of the decision-making loop.

So far Mr Netanyahu has held back from sending in a ground assault, perhaps recalling how Israelis at first eagerly backed a war to knock out hostile rocket-launchers in Lebanon in 2006, but soon turned against it when Israeli soldiers began to be bogged down there and killed. It is assumed that Hamas has laid all sorts of traps in case of an Israeli invasion.

But nor is it clear that Mr Netanyahu wants actually to destroy Hamas, lest an even more extreme outfit, perhaps tied to al-Qaeda, were to supplant it in Gaza. If he were to annex the strip, as some on the right advise, bringing its people again under direct Israeli rule, the demographic balance in Israel proper plus the Palestinian territories under occupation would tip against the combined area’s Jewish inhabitants. Most of Mr Netanyahu’s closest advisers probably think it better to keep Gaza isolated and besieged as before, with an enfeebled Hamas still in charge, “with its nose an inch above the water”, in the words of an Israeli analyst.

As the death toll rises, foreign pressure on Israel to meet some of Hamas’s demands will rise (see article). Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, has called on Israel to open a humanitarian corridor to let medicine and basic supplies in and wounded or infirm people out.

European governments and the European Union have little influence in the Holy Land these days. The EU’s policy of refusing contact with Hamas makes it almost impossible for Europeans to mediate. Non-EU Norway and Switzerland, which used to talk to Hamas, again offered their services. Turkey’s government, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, says it will help, but Mr Netanyahu wants nothing to do with him.

The Americans still have the best chance of persuading Mr Netanyahu to ease off, but their clout has weakened under the presidency of Barack Obama. Since he too is unable, under Congressional strictures, to talk directly to Hamas, he asked Qatar, the state in the region that is friendliest to Hamas, to urge it to accept a ceasefire; Khaled Meshal, Hamas’s most influential leader outside Gaza, is based in Qatar. But the Qataris do not seem able to persuade Hamas to back down.

The Israelis reckoned it would be cleverer to get Egypt to handle Hamas, knowing that Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s new president, also dislikes it intensely. The terms of the ceasefire offered through Egypt’s offices amounted virtually to a surrender by Hamas. “It was a trap,” says a European diplomat who still meets Hamas. “Hamas knows that Sisi wants to strangle the movement even more than Israel does.” Since Egypt’s generals overthrew Mr Sisi’s predecessor, Muhammad Morsi, last year, they have closed most of the tunnels under the border with Gaza which served as a lifeline, carrying basic goods as well as arms into the strip. Mr Sisi seems content to see Hamas thrashed.

Other proposals tend to focus on rebuilding Gaza’s economy, on the ground that only if the people of the strip become better off will they turn their backs on the puritans, zealots and rocket-launchers of Hamas. Even before Operation Protective Edge, electricity functioned for less than half the day. Half of Gazans are out of work or unpaid. Some say that in 18 months Gazans will have no piped drinking water at all. But proposals for rebuilding Gaza’s economy seem unworldly in present circumstances. And if the rockets keep on raining down on Israel and the bombs keep clobbering Gaza, there may be precious little left to rebuild.