Today's Ultimate Palestine Solution: Build a Tunnel

Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak, campaigning for Prime Minister, has offered a novel solution for Palestinian unity: build a 48-kilometre (30-mile) tunnel connecting Beit Hanoun in Gaza to Dura in the West Bank: "The preferred way to do it would be to dig a tunnel that would be under Israeli sovereignty, but under totally free and unobstructed use by Palestinians."

There may a couple of hitches with the proposal. Barak estimated the tunnel "would cost $2 to $3 billion, but did not say who would foot the bill, nor did he say under what conditions it would be built".

It is not reported whether Barak noted the irony of proposing the region's longest tunnel at the same time that his military forces were demolishing much smaller models in southern Gaza.

Gaza Rocket Update: It's Fatah, Not Hamas, Doing the Firing

Keep a close eye on this twist in the Israel-Gaza story. I missed it until it was pointed out by a reader, and I think few in the media have noticed. On Sunday several rockets and 10 mortars were fired into southern Israel from Gaza, and Israel responded by hitting a Hamas police headquarters and tunnels in southern Gaza.

Which might seem a logical response, except it wasn't Hamas launching the rockets and mortars:

The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the military wing of the Fatah faction led by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, told Al Jazeera that it carried out the attacks....Israel, however, holds Hamas responsible for all rocket fire coming from Gaza.

This might explain why Israeli Minister of Defence Ehud Barak, in contrast to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's initial declaration of a "disproportionate response" to the rockets and mortars, stressed last night that there would not be a renewed Israeli invasion of Gaza.