The Latest from Israel-Palestine-Gaza (25 January)

Later Updates: The Latest from Israel-Palestine-Gaza (26 January)
Earlier Updates: The Latest from Israel-Palestine-Gaza (24 January)
Latest Post: How Israel Helped Spawn Hamas

11:15 p.m. Finally, Some White Smoke. After talks in Cairo today, Hamas official Ayman Taha said his organisation is offering a one-year cease-fire to Israel.

This is just an opening move, however. The Hamas delegation has to confirm the 12-month offer with the organisation's leadership in Damascus, and it is linked to a full opening of Gazan borders. Israel's offer of an 18-month cease-fire, presented by the Egyptians to Hamas, held out only a partial opening of crossings.

10:45 p.m. Soft Power, Tehran Style. While aid to Gaza is held up by Israeli restrictions, Iran continues to further its political objectives with assistance. Speaker of the Parliament Ali Larijani said today that Iran will rebuild the Gazan Parliament destroyed by Israeli air raids.

9:30 p.m. While there were no concrete results from the Cairo talks, Egypt is publicly rushing away from Israel and towards "the Palestinians". In Brussels, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit appealed to Europeans to press Tel Aviv to ease the economic blockade, "I ask the European Union to do (things) very, very quickly to rebuild to help the Palestinians to get out of this crisis. We need to force the Israelis to negotiate and also tell them to open crossings and to give Palestinians a chance to live in a normal way."

Gheit's statement is more rhetoric than substance, however. Egypt is refusing to have foreign monitors on its side of the border, so it is effectively passing the buck to Israel, which is balking at an arrangement on the Gazan side.

Meanwhile, some Europeans are still stuck on the old script of the Palestinian Authority's triumphant re-entry into Gaza. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband proclaimed, ""The reunification of the Palestinians under the recognised and cherished voice of President Abbas is so important."



6:35 p.m. No significant news from the talks in Cairo with Hamas and Fatah delegations. Egyptian officials have issued a holding statement that  "Egyptian efforts to consolidate the ceasefire, reach a [permanent] truce, reopen Gaza crossings and resume Palestinian national dialogue" were discussed.

6:10 p.m. As expected, Israel's Cabinet has approved a measure providing legal protection to its military officers if they are accused of war crimes over the Gaza conflict.

5:15 p.m. Propaganda of the Day. Uzi Mahnaimi, who writes from Tel Aviv for the Times, trumpets, "An American naval taskforce in the Gulf of Aden has been ordered to hunt for suspicious Iranian arms ships heading for the Red Sea as Tehran seeks to re-equip Hamas."

That's not news --- we posted this days ago --- but then Mahnaimi is not a reporter in any meaningful sense of the day. Instead, he's a channel for Tel Aviv's "information" line, which in this case is ramping up the campaign against Iran.

Thus Mahnaimi states that a US ship intercepted a "former Russian vessel" and held it for two days --- again, not news, as we noted the incident when it occurred earlier this week --- and adds, "According to unconfirmed reports, weapons were found." Very unconfirmed: the former Russian vessel had artillery, which Hamas does not use, and no further arms were found when it was searched in report.

Of course, this doesn't stop Mahnaimi, who tosses in the Israeli suspicion that two Iranian destroyers, sent to help fight piracy off the Somalian coast, are part of a scheme to run weapons to Gaza. And he has more:

Iran plans to ship Fajr rockets with a 50-mile range to Gaza. This would bring Tel Aviv, its international airport and the Dimona nuclear reactor within reach for the first time.

Of course, Iran may be supplying weapons to Hamas but this story is Israeli-inspired misinformation, of value to Tel Aviv's political schemes but worthless for any analysis of the aftermath of the Gaza conflict.

3:30 p.m. Osama Hamdan, the Hamas representative in Beirut, has issued a defiant statement about the attempt to block arms shipments to Gaza: "We will continue to get weapons into Gaza and the (West) Bank. Let nobody think we will surrender to measures. Perhaps matters will get more difficult, but we are ready to ride out any difficulty ... so that the resistance continues."

Hamdan added that those who think monitoring can detect the movement of weapons through tunnels "are deluded".

11:15 a.m. Rafah Kid has posted a series of new photos from Jabaliya with the note, "It's a mess here."

11 a.m. From the diary of Mohammad Dawwas, reprinted in The Independent of London:

22 January: I went to the burns department in Shifa hospital. I've never seen anything like this in my life. These phosphorus burns. Their bodies were black. One person has stitches everywhere. It's worse than killing people. They look like the living dead. I also went to the north, to Beit Lahiya. This was one of the most beautiful areas of farmland. Now it's gone, you can't recognise the place. I wanted to cry.

10:05 a.m. More on the aid front: Iran has established a Gaza Reconstruction Headquarters to "build 1,000 houses, 10 schools and five mosques, and reconstruct 500 shops, a hospital and a university".

10 a.m. Hamas has begun distribution of $52 million of aid in Gaza, with families receiving $1300 for each member killed and $650 for each wounded. The Observer of London has a lengthy background article.

Morning update (9:20 a.m. Israel/Gaza time): Important talks in Cairo today with Hamas and Fatah delegations on issues such as the manning of the border crossings. Hamas representatives will meet the head of Egyptian intelligence, Omar Suleiman, who met with an Israeli envoy on Thursday.

As we noted yesterday, if Hamas and Fatah agree on an arrangement in which some Gazan-based members of the Palestinian Authority join the border force, along with guards from European Union countries and Turkey, it will throw a difficult choice back at Israel. Tel Aviv will either to hold out, maintaining its stranglehold on aid and the Gazan economy, or ease its policy on the crossings.

How Israel Helped Spawn Hamas

We're privileged to re-post Andrew Higgins' outstanding piece of journalism in today's Wall Street Journal, which combines an impressive historical summary with contemporary analysis. He establishes how Israel assisted with the creation and growth of Hamas from the late 1970s. (I've known this for years from academic works; however, many people --- including a number I've encountered on the Net in recent weeks --- refuse to accept the evidence.)

More importantly, however, Higgins offers lessons which Israel's leaders conveniently forgot for the sake of this conflict:

When it became clear in the early 1990s that Gaza's Islamists had mutated from a religious group into a fighting force aimed at Israel -- particularly after they turned to suicide bombings in 1994 -- Israel cracked down with ferocious force. But each military assault only increased Hamas's appeal to ordinary Palestinians.

HOW ISRAEL HELPED TO SPAWN HAMAS
Andrew Higgins

Surveying the wreckage of a neighbor's bungalow hit by a Palestinian rocket, retired Israeli official Avner Cohen traces the missile's trajectory back to an "enormous, stupid mistake" made 30 years ago.

"Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation," says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel's destruction.

Instead of trying to curb Gaza's Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with "Yassins," primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric.

Last Saturday, after 22 days of war, Israel announced a halt to the offensive. The assault was aimed at stopping Hamas rockets from falling on Israel. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hailed a "determined and successful military operation." More than 1,200 Palestinians had died. Thirteen Israelis were also killed.

Hamas responded the next day by lobbing five rockets towards the Israeli town of Sderot, a few miles down the road from Moshav Tekuma, the farming village where Mr. Cohen lives. Hamas then announced its own cease-fire.

Since then, Hamas leaders have emerged from hiding and reasserted their control over Gaza. Egyptian-mediated talks aimed at a more durable truce are expected to start this weekend. President Barack Obama said this week that lasting calm "requires more than a long cease-fire" and depends on Israel and a future Palestinian state "living side by side in peace and security."

A look at Israel's decades-long dealings with Palestinian radicals -- including some little-known attempts to cooperate with the Islamists -- reveals a catalog of unintended and often perilous consequences. Time and again, Israel's efforts to find a pliant Palestinian partner that is both credible with Palestinians and willing to eschew violence, have backfired. Would-be partners have turned into foes or lost the support of their people.

Israel's experience echoes that of the U.S., which, during the Cold War, looked to Islamists as a useful ally against communism. Anti-Soviet forces backed by America after Moscow's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan later mutated into al Qaeda.

At stake is the future of what used to be the British Mandate of Palestine, the biblical lands now comprising Israel and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Since 1948, when the state of Israel was established, Israelis and Palestinians have each asserted claims over the same territory.

The Palestinian cause was for decades led by the PLO, which Israel regarded as a terrorist outfit and sought to crush until the 1990s, when the PLO dropped its vow to destroy the Jewish state. The PLO's Palestinian rival, Hamas, led by Islamist militants, refused to recognize Israel and vowed to continue "resistance." Hamas now controls Gaza, a crowded, impoverished sliver of land on the Mediterranean from which Israel pulled out troops and settlers in 2005.

When Israel first encountered Islamists in Gaza in the 1970s and '80s, they seemed focused on studying the Quran, not on confrontation with Israel. The Israeli government officially recognized a precursor to Hamas called Mujama Al-Islamiya, registering the group as a charity. It allowed Mujama members to set up an Islamic university and build mosques, clubs and schools. Crucially, Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled, sometimes violently, for influence in both Gaza and the West Bank.

"When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake," says David Hacham, who worked in Gaza in the late 1980s and early '90s as an Arab-affairs expert in the Israeli military. "But at the time nobody thought about the possible results."

Israeli officials who served in Gaza disagree on how much their own actions may have contributed to the rise of Hamas. They blame the group's recent ascent on outsiders, primarily Iran. This view is shared by the Israeli government. "Hamas in Gaza was built by Iran as a foundation for power, and is backed through funding, through training and through the provision of advanced weapons," Mr. Olmert said last Saturday. Hamas has denied receiving military assistance from Iran.

Arieh Spitzen, the former head of the Israeli military's Department of Palestinian Affairs, says that even if Israel had tried to stop the Islamists sooner, he doubts it could have done much to curb political Islam, a movement that was spreading across the Muslim world. He says attempts to stop it are akin to trying to change the internal rhythms of nature: "It is like saying: 'I will kill all the mosquitoes.' But then you get even worse insects that will kill you...You break the balance. You kill Hamas you might get al Qaeda."

When it became clear in the early 1990s that Gaza's Islamists had mutated from a religious group into a fighting force aimed at Israel -- particularly after they turned to suicide bombings in 1994 -- Israel cracked down with ferocious force. But each military assault only increased Hamas's appeal to ordinary Palestinians. The group ultimately trounced secular rivals, notably Fatah, in a 2006 election supported by Israel's main ally, the U.S.

Now, one big fear in Israel and elsewhere is that while Hamas has been hammered hard, the war might have boosted the group's popular appeal. Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas administration in Gaza, came out of hiding last Sunday to declare that "God has granted us a great victory."

Most damaged from the war, say many Palestinians, is Fatah, now Israel's principal negotiating partner. "Everyone is praising the resistance and thinks that Fatah is not part of it," says Baker Abu-Baker, a longtime Fatah supporter and author of a book on Hamas.

A Lack of Devotion

Hamas traces its roots back to the Muslim Brotherhood, a group set up in Egypt in 1928. The Brotherhood believed that the woes of the Arab world spring from a lack of Islamic devotion. Its slogan: "Islam is the solution. The Quran is our constitution." Its philosophy today underpins modern, and often militantly intolerant, political Islam from Algeria to Indonesia.

After the 1948 establishment of Israel, the Brotherhood recruited a few followers in Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza and elsewhere, but secular activists came to dominate the Palestinian nationalist movement.

At the time, Gaza was ruled by Egypt. The country's then-president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was a secular nationalist who brutally repressed the Brotherhood. In 1967, Nasser suffered a crushing defeat when Israel triumphed in the six-day war. Israel took control of Gaza and also the West Bank.

"We were all stunned," says Palestinian writer and Hamas supporter Azzam Tamimi. He was at school at the time in Kuwait and says he became close to a classmate named Khaled Mashaal, now Hamas's Damascus-based political chief. "The Arab defeat provided the Brotherhood with a big opportunity," says Mr. Tamimi.

In Gaza, Israel hunted down members of Fatah and other secular PLO factions, but it dropped harsh restrictions imposed on Islamic activists by the territory's previous Egyptian rulers. Fatah, set up in 1964, was the backbone of the PLO, which was responsible for hijackings, bombings and other violence against Israel. Arab states in 1974 declared the PLO the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people world-wide.

The Muslim Brotherhood, led in Gaza by Sheikh Yassin, was free to spread its message openly. In addition to launching various charity projects, Sheikh Yassin collected money to reprint the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian member of the Brotherhood who, before his execution by President Nasser, advocated global jihad. He is now seen as one of the founding ideologues of militant political Islam.

Mr. Cohen, who worked at the time for the Israeli government's religious affairs department in Gaza, says he began to hear disturbing reports in the mid-1970s about Sheikh Yassin from traditional Islamic clerics. He says they warned that the sheikh had no formal Islamic training and was ultimately more interested in politics than faith. "They said, 'Keep away from Yassin. He is a big danger,'" recalls Mr. Cohen.

Instead, Israel's military-led administration in Gaza looked favorably on the paraplegic cleric, who set up a wide network of schools, clinics, a library and kindergartens. Sheikh Yassin formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya, which was officially recognized by Israel as a charity and then, in 1979, as an association. Israel also endorsed the establishment of the Islamic University of Gaza, which it now regards as a hotbed of militancy. The university was one of the first targets hit by Israeli warplanes in the recent war.

Brig. General Yosef Kastel, Gaza's Israeli governor at the time, is too ill to comment, says his wife. But Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who took over as governor in Gaza in late 1979, says he had no illusions about Sheikh Yassin's long-term intentions or the perils of political Islam. As Israel's former military attache in Iran, he'd watched Islamic fervor topple the Shah. However, in Gaza, says Mr. Segev, "our main enemy was Fatah," and the cleric "was still 100% peaceful" towards Israel. Former officials say Israel was also at the time wary of being viewed as an enemy of Islam.

Mr. Segev says he had regular contact with Sheikh Yassin, in part to keep an eye on him. He visited his mosque and met the cleric around a dozen times. It was illegal at the time for Israelis to meet anyone from the PLO. Mr. Segev later arranged for the cleric to be taken to Israel for hospital treatment. "We had no problems with him," he says.

In fact, the cleric and Israel had a shared enemy: secular Palestinian activists. After a failed attempt in Gaza to oust secularists from leadership of the Palestinian Red Crescent, the Muslim version of the Red Cross, Mujama staged a violent demonstration, storming the Red Crescent building. Islamists also attacked shops selling liquor and cinemas. The Israeli military mostly stood on the sidelines.

Mr. Segev says the army didn't want to get involved in Palestinian quarrels but did send soldiers to prevent Islamists from burning down the house of the Red Crescent's secular chief, a socialist who supported the PLO.

'An Alternative to the PLO'

Clashes between Islamists and secular nationalists spread to the West Bank and escalated during the early 1980s, convulsing college campuses, particularly Birzeit University, a center of political activism.

As the fighting between rival student factions at Birzeit grew more violent, Brig. Gen. Shalom Harari, then a military intelligence officer in Gaza, says he received a call from Israeli soldiers manning a checkpoint on the road out of Gaza. They had stopped a bus carrying Islamic activists who wanted to join the battle against Fatah at Birzeit. "I said: 'If they want to burn each other let them go,'" recalls Mr. Harari.

A leader of Birzeit's Islamist faction at the time was Mahmoud Musleh, now a pro-Hamas member of a Palestinian legislature elected in 2006. He recalls how usually aggressive Israeli security forces stood back and let conflagration develop. He denies any collusion between his own camp and the Israelis, but says "they hoped we would become an alternative to the PLO."

A year later, in 1984, the Israeli military received a tip-off from Fatah supporters that Sheikh Yassin's Gaza Islamists were collecting arms, according to Israeli officials in Gaza at the time. Israeli troops raided a mosque and found a cache of weapons. Sheikh Yassin was jailed. He told Israeli interrogators the weapons were for use against rival Palestinians, not Israel, according to Mr. Hacham, the military affairs expert who says he spoke frequently with jailed Islamists. The cleric was released after a year and continued to expand Mujama's reach across Gaza.

Around the time of Sheikh Yassin's arrest, Mr. Cohen, the religious affairs official, sent a report to senior Israeli military and civilian officials in Gaza. Describing the cleric as a "diabolical" figure, he warned that Israel's policy towards the Islamists was allowing Mujama to develop into a dangerous force.

"I believe that by continuing to turn away our eyes, our lenient approach to Mujama will in the future harm us. I therefore suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face," Mr. Cohen wrote.

Mr. Harari, the military intelligence officer, says this and other warnings were ignored. But, he says, the reason for this was neglect, not a desire to fortify the Islamists: "Israel never financed Hamas. Israel never armed Hamas."

Roni Shaked, a former officer of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, and author of a book on Hamas, says Sheikh Yassin and his followers had a long-term perspective whose dangers were not understood at the time. "They worked slowly, slowly, step by step according to the Muslim Brotherhood plan."

Declaring Jihad

In 1987, several Palestinians were killed in a traffic accident involving an Israeli driver, triggering a wave of protests that became known as the first Intifada, Mr. Yassin and six other Mujama Islamists launched Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement. Hamas's charter, released a year later, is studded with anti-Semitism and declares "jihad its path and death for the cause of Allah its most sublime belief."

Israeli officials, still focused on Fatah and initially unaware of the Hamas charter, continued to maintain contacts with the Gaza Islamists. Mr. Hacham, the military Arab affairs expert, remembers taking one of Hamas's founders, Mahmoud Zahar, to meet Israel's then defense minister, Yitzhak Rabin, as part of regular consultations between Israeli officials and Palestinians not linked to the PLO. Mr. Zahar, the only Hamas founder known to be alive today, is now the group's senior political leader in Gaza.

In 1989, Hamas carried out its first attack on Israel, abducting and killing two soldiers. Israel arrested Sheikh Yassin and sentenced him to life. It later rounded up more than 400 suspected Hamas activists, including Mr. Zahar, and deported them to southern Lebanon. There, they hooked up with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed A-Team of anti-Israeli militancy.

Many of the deportees later returned to Gaza. Hamas built up its arsenal and escalated its attacks, while all along maintaining the social network that underpinned its support in Gaza.

Meanwhile, its enemy, the PLO, dropped its commitment to Israel's destruction and started negotiating a two-state settlement. Hamas accused it of treachery. This accusation found increasing resonance as Israel kept developing settlements on occupied Palestinian land, particularly the West Bank. Though the West Bank had passed to the nominal control of a new Palestinian Authority, it was still dotted with Israeli military checkpoints and a growing number of Israeli settlers.

Unable to uproot a now entrenched Islamist network that had suddenly replaced the PLO as its main foe, Israel tried to decapitate it. It started targeting Hamas leaders. This, too, made no dent in Hamas's support, and sometimes even helped the group. In 1997, for example, Israel's Mossad spy agency tried to poison Hamas's exiled political leader Mr. Mashaal, who was then living in Jordan.

The agents got caught and, to get them out of a Jordanian jail, Israel agreed to release Sheikh Yassin. The cleric set off on a tour of the Islamic world to raise support and money. He returned to Gaza to a hero's welcome.

Efraim Halevy, a veteran Mossad officer who negotiated the deal that released Sheikh Yassin, says the cleric's freedom was hard to swallow, but Israel had no choice. After the fiasco in Jordan, Mr. Halevy was named director of Mossad, a position he held until 2002. Two years later, Sheikh Yassin was killed by an Israeli air strike.

Mr. Halevy has in recent years urged Israel to negotiate with Hamas. He says that "Hamas can be crushed," but he believes that "the price of crushing Hamas is a price that Israel would prefer not to pay." When Israel's authoritarian secular neighbor, Syria, launched a campaign to wipe out Muslim Brotherhood militants in the early 1980s it killed more than 20,000 people, many of them civilians.

In its recent war in Gaza, Israel didn't set the destruction of Hamas as its goal. It limited its stated objectives to halting the Islamists' rocket fire and battering their overall military capacity. At the start of the Israeli operation in December, Defense Minister Ehud Barak told parliament that the goal was "to deal Hamas a severe blow, a blow that will cause it to stop its hostile actions from Gaza at Israeli citizens and soldiers."

Walking back to his house from the rubble of his neighbor's home, Mr. Cohen, the former religious affairs official in Gaza, curses Hamas and also what he sees as missteps that allowed Islamists to put down deep roots in Gaza.

He recalls a 1970s meeting with a traditional Islamic cleric who wanted Israel to stop cooperating with the Muslim Brotherhood followers of Sheikh Yassin: "He told me: 'You are going to have big regrets in 20 or 30 years.' He was right."

Coming Next in Iran: Sanctions, Military Action, and the Yellowcake Story

A very clever story in The Times: "Iran in Scramble for Fresh Uranium Products". Whether the article is great investigative reporting uncovering the truth, a well-developed "information" campaign by US and British officials, or a bit of both, it may point the way towards the US-UK towards Tehran before and after this spring's Iranian elections.



The line of the story is that "diplomatic sources believe that Iran’s stockpile of yellow cake uranium, produced from uranium ore, is close to running out and could be exhausted within months". Therefore, "countries including Britain, the US, France and Germany have started intensive diplomatic efforts to dissuade major uranium producers from selling to Iran". The Foreign Office leaked cables to The Times reporters of British efforts to "urge Kazakhstan, one of the world’s biggest producers, to ignore any possible approaches to obtain imports" and confirmed a similar campaign in Uzbekistan.

The two-fold strategy behind the story? The Times writes, "[This is a move that, while unlikely to cripple any effort to develop a bomb, would blunt [Iran's] ambitions and help to contain the threat." That means:

1. Britain and the US, supported by France, Canada, Australia, and Germany, maintain diplomatic pressure for continued, and possibly enhanced, sanctions against Iran. This will probably come through bilateral and multilateral arrangements rather than UN Security Council action.

2. Britain and the US damp down any calls for direct action against Iran such as military strikes. If Tehran can't get yellowcake, then it can't pose an "imminent threat", can it?

The Latest from Israel-Palestine-Gaza (23 January)

Latest Post: George Mitchell on the Israel-Palestine Issue, 22 October 2008
Related Post: Chomsky on Gaza 2009
Related Post: Enduring America in UCD College Tribune on Gaza
Related Post: Regime Change in Gaza - The Israeli Strategy Continues

2 p.m. An intriguing development, but one which will need some detective work to assess its significance. President Obama “asked Saudi King Abdullah for support in halting weapons smuggling into Gaza and underscored the importance of U.S.-Saudi ties” in a Friday phone call.

The call takes on added significance because an influential member of the Saudi Royal Family, Prince Turki al-Feisal, launched an attack against the Bush Administration’s “poisonous legacy” in a newspaper article on Friday morning, warning, “If the U.S. wants to continue playing a leadership role in the Middle East and keep its strategic alliances intact — especially its ’special relationship’ with Saudi Arabia — it will have to drastically revise its policies vis-a-vis Israel and Palestine.”

So the first message in Obama’s call was not to get active Saudi participation in the naval blockade of Gaza but assurances that Riyadh would not try to undermine it by moving cash and material to Palestinian groups in the area. The second message, however, is more important and hard to decipher:

Do those US-Saudi ties mean that Obama will accept Saudi ideas for Israel-Palestinian negotiations, for example, a revival of the 2002 Mecca proposals that the Bush Administration flagrantly rebuffed? Or is Washington expecting the Saudis to follow the lead of a yet-seen approach that will be unveiled in the visit of George Mitchell to the region?



11:05 p.m. The Egypt-Israel Alliance Restored. This really should be headline news....

The Jerusalem Post reports that Cairo and Tel Aviv have agreed on a plan for up to 1500 Egyptian guards to "secure" the Egypt-Gaza border. Egypt and Israel will cooperate on " intelligence cooperation, obstacles in Sinai and the deployment of new tunnel-detection technology along the border". The plan was approved by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak after a late-night meeting on Thursday.

The agreement restores Egyptian-Israeli cooperation on the isolation of Hamas and economic blockade of Gaza after Cairo balked at having an international force patrol the border.

10:45 p.m. France has announced it will be sending a frigate with helicopters to patrol the Gaza coast.

This is the military dimension of the French strategy, working with Israel, the US, and Egypt to block arms supplies to Hamas. The question is the whether the political dimension, in which Paris persuades the Obama Administration to talk to Hamas or (more likely) serves as an interlocutor for quiet discussions, is implemented.

8:43 p.m. Israel continues to restrict aid into Gaza. It is allowing 120 truckloads of food and medicine (compared to traffic last summer of 750 trucks/day), but is blocking transport steel and cement and preventing cash --- even though it comes from the Palestinian Authority --- from reaching Gazans.

8:40 p.m. White House release says President Obama phoned Saudi King Abdullah this afternoon. No other details given.

7:15 p.m. What is the definition of Crocodile Tears? Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on his reaction to a Gazan doctor hearing, live on Israeli television, about the death of three daughters and a niece: "I cried when I saw this. Who didn't? How could you not?"

5:10 p.m. The State Department's Twitterers pass on news of a US interception and two-day search of an Iranian-owned ship in the Red Sea.

No jackpot this time, however, in the quest to link Tehran and Hamas. The ship was carrying artillery shells, but the Gazan organisation doesn't use artillery.

4:20 p.m. Reuters reports the statement of United Nations official John Ging that Israel's invasion of Gaza has strengthened the hand of extremists and that growing Gazan anger can only be assuaged by a credible independent investigation: "The extremists here -- there are more now at the end of this conflict than there were at the start, that's the product of such conflict -- are very confident in their rhetoric that there should be no expectation that justice will be delivered through the rule of law. Now we must prove that wrong,"

3:25 p.m. Pro-Israel Twitterers are pushing the news that twelve representatives of Physicians for Human Rights have been allowed into Gaza by Israeli forces. They might want to reflect on the timing and scale of that "concession", given the more than 2000 Gazans who are still hospitalised with serious injuries. And they want to take note of the sub-headline in the article: "Many families were simply wiped out during IDF offensive".

12:20 p.m. Profiles in Broadcasting Courage. The BBC has refused to air a national humanitarian appeal for Gaza by the Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella group for 13 charities. The explanation? ""The decision was made because of question marks about the delivery of aid in a volatile situation and also to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC's impartiality in the context of [a] news story."

Special Note: Using that criteria of "impartiality", the BBC would not have aired LiveAid in the midst of the Ethiopian famine (and civil war) in 1984-85.

11:10 a.m. The excellent analyst Jim Lobe finds grounds for optimism both in the appointment of George Mitchell as President Obama's envoy to the Middle East and in Obama's statement yesterday.

11:05 a.m. Just to highlight the Fatah-Hamas struggle and the possible "blowback" from Israeli operations --- it's Hamas, not Fatah, who is stronger in both Gaza and the West Bank --- Donald Macintyre offers this assessment in The Independent of London:

The sharp decline in support for Fatah and the discrediting of Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, because of his inertia during the 22-day Gaza war, will make it very difficult for the US and the EU to pretend that Fatah are the true representatives of the Palestinian community.

10:55 a.m. Saudi Arabian Prince Turki al-Faisal has fired a warning shot at Washington over Israel, Palestine, and Gaza, writing in The Financial Times: "Unless the new U.S. administration takes forceful steps to prevent any further suffering and slaughter of Palestinians, the peace process, the U.S.-Saudi relationship and the stability of the region are at risk."

Turki isn't just "a member of the Saudi royal family". He's a former leader of Saudi intelligence services and a former Saudi ambassador to Britain. Consider the Obama Administration put on notice. Any Saudi backing of the attempt to knock off Hamas is now outweighed by the need to condemn Israel for its military and political approach: "If the U.S. wants to continue playing a leadership role in the Middle East and keep its strategic alliances intact -- especially its 'special relationship' with Saudi Arabia -- it will have to drastically revise its policies vis-a-vis Israel and Palestine."

10:50 a.m. Twitter One-Liner of the Morning: "Best thing about appointment of George Mitchell as Middle East envoy is it effectively puts demonic Tony Blair out of a job."



10:30 a.m. We've posted a separate blog,  The Strategy for Gaza Unravels, on Israel's attempt to tie reconstruction aid for Gaza to regime change, toppling Hamas and re-installing the Palestinian Authority.

Morning update (8:45 a.m. Israel/Gaza time): CNN carries a tip-of-the-iceberg story about the central battle over Who Runs Gaza?: "Rival Factions  Trade Accusations Over Spying, Violence". It reports on Hamas accusations of spying for Israel by Fatah members and on counter-accusations that Hamas has carried out "punishment shootings".

The story is mainly a recap of information which has been out for days, although it does add some detail. Fatah is alleging that at least 175 of its members have been rounded up and tortured, while the neighbours of Hamas leader Saed Siam, killed in an Israeli airstrike last week, are claiming that informers pinpointed the house for the Israelis.

What is missing in the article is any recognition of the wider political struggle to lead Gaza, including the linking of the Israeli attacks to plans to return the Palestinian Authority to power.

Regime Change in Gaza: The Israeli Strategy Continues

Update: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas on Friday, two days after he talked to President Barack Obama. Clinton assured Abbas of her commitment to the peace process and "affirmed the Obama administration will seek to enhance relations based on the support of the Palestinian presidency and the Palestinian National Authority".

A stunning article in The Jerusalem Post, which exposes the attempt (and failure) to install the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, both to topple Hamas and to score a major victory over Iran.

The immediate focus of the article is the concern of "diplomatic officials" that "the international community has to decide within a short time how to funnel reconstruction aid into the Gaza Strip without benefiting Hamas, before Iran moves in and does the job itself as it did in south Lebanon in 2006".

This, however, is linked to the wider Israeli strategy for regime change. Officials in the Israeli Defense Ministry told The Post, "This is a way for [Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud] Abbas to get back in control of the Gaza Strip. If he is in charge of the money, Hamas will have to work with him and he will be involved in what happens in Gaza."



So Tel Aviv presses on, ever after the failure of their military campaign to overthrow Hamas. The approach now is an enhanced blockade, limiting aid in addition to choking off the Gazan economy. But I still can't fathom the approach: how can you hold a people hostage to starvation, lack of shelter, and inadequate medical care and then expect them to accept your choice of their leaders?