Israel and Hamas agree to cease-fire

What happened

Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas this week agreed to a cease-fire after eight days of bloody violence that saw Israel bombarded with hundreds of missiles and the Gaza Strip pounded by dozens of airstrikes. The deal, negotiated by the U.S. and Egypt, heads off a possible Israeli ground invasion of Gaza, and calls for Israel to stop all hostilities and targeted assassinations in the Gaza Strip and for all Palestinian factions to stop launching attacks from the territory. If the truce holds, it will serve as the foundation for negotiations over a broader, more durable peace deal that could include an easing of Israel’s blockade of Gaza. “This is a critical moment for the region,” said U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who announced the deal in Cairo alongside Egypt’s Foreign Minister Mohamed Amr. “The people of this region deserve the chance to live in peace.”

The agreement came after days of Israeli air assaults on missile-launching sites, munitions dumps, smuggling tunnels, and government buildings inside Gaza. Medical officials said that at least 144 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians, died in the attacks. Over the same period, militants inside the Gaza Strip fired at least 1,400 rockets into Israel, killing four civilians and one soldier. A suspected Palestinian terrorist also threw a bomb into an Israeli bus, injuring 22 people.

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What the editorials said

Hamas bears the primary responsibility for this pointless conflict, said The New York Times. The Islamist group is “so consumed with hatred for Israel that it has repeatedly resorted to violence, no matter the cost to its own people.” Gaza militants fired between 750 and 800 rockets into Israel this year before Israel finally retaliated last week by assassinating Hamas’s military mastermind Ahmed al-Jabari and launching its air campaign.

Thankfully, Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense helped blunt the militants’ aggression, said The Wall Street Journal. The high-tech interceptor system—largely paid for by the U.S.—took out almost 90 percent of the missiles aimed at populated areas. Iron Dome not only saved lives, it provided “more time for military and political leaders to decide how to respond.” If missiles had been constantly landing in Israeli cities, a full ground invasion would have quickly followed.

What the columnists said

Don’t expect this peace deal to last, said Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal. Every time the Jewish state has extended its hand to the Palestinians in Gaza, it has been bitten. Israel’s 2005 withdrawal of security forces, and another peace deal in 2008, yielded a “Palestinian regime even more radical and emboldened than it had been before.” So long as Hamas stays in power, Israel can expect “many reruns of this same, sordid show.”

If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu really wants to hurt Hamas, he should attack it politically, said Peter Beinart in TheDailyBeast.com. That means seriously negotiating with Hamas’s rival, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who believes that forging a deal with Israel is more likely to bring his “people dignity and justice than are Hamas’s rockets.” But it’s hard for Abbas to convince Palestinians to pursue a nonviolent path to statehood when Netanyahu keeps permitting expanded Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Israel could also undermine Hamas by ending its crippling blockade of Gaza, said Robert Wright in TheAtlantic.com. Unemployment has soared to over 40 percent since Israeli sanctions were implemented in 2006. So it’s no surprise that many desperate, jobless young men have decided to take up arms with the militants.

Hamas isn’t going away anytime soon, said James Kitfield in NationalJournal.com. In the wake of the Arab Spring, Islamist governments are openly allying themselves with Hamas’s radicals, rather than with Abbas’s more secular Palestinian Authority. Over the past week, Hamas has received outpourings of diplomatic support from officials in Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, and Tunisia. Unless Israel can empower and make peace with moderate Palestinians, the region’s growing Islamic solidarity may leave it “increasingly isolated,” and ensnared “in a perpetual cycle of tactical skirmishes with an ever-more-potent opposition.”