JERUSALEM — As Israeli troops once again operated inside the Gaza Strip on Friday, the risks of a deep entanglement, a failure to curb the rocket fire, and the condemnation of civilian casualties were all too apparent.
Twice before, Israel has battled Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that dominates Gaza, and twice before, Israel has halted under international pressure without eliminating the threat of rocket fire.
But this time, officials and analysts say, the landscape is different. Israel has publicly framed a clear agenda targeting tunnels it says militants built to store weapons or stage attacks on its territory. This time, a weakened Hamas cannot turn to Egypt for respite. This time, Western leaders appear more patient: President Obama expressed concern Friday about “the loss of more innocent life” but also said no nation should be subjected to a hail of rockets or underground incursions.
The start of the ground campaign was a stark contrast to Israel’s 2009 invasion, when forces quickly bisected the tiny coastal enclave and blockaded Gaza City, where they engaged in gun battles with Hamas fighters. On Friday, the troops operated mainly in farmland within about a mile of Gaza’s northern, southern and eastern edges, and quickly announced they had uncovered more than 20 tunnel exit points.
Setting the bar relatively low helps hold back public expectations, provide the military with achievable goals, and build international legitimacy. It also reflects Israel’s reluctance to re-engage long-term in Gaza or rout Hamas only to find it replaced by even more radical groups. Though on Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the military to “prepare for the possibility of widening, significantly,” its offensive.
But if the action on the ground has changed from past conflicts, so has the diplomatic horizon. Analysts said that political shifts among Palestinians and across the region had made the familiar paths to cease-fire agreements harder to find this time.
Hamas, financially desperate and politically isolated but rich in armaments, is desperate to score points with the public by either harming Israelis or curbing what it calls the siege that has plunged Gaza into economic and humanitarian disaster. Israel, under pressure internationally for expanding settlements in the West Bank and for the number of civilians killed, including about 65 children, in the 11-day assault on Gaza, wants mainly to disarm the militants.
“There’s a certain contradiction here,” said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli diplomat and university president. “That’s what you need mediators for — you find that magic formula, constructive ambiguity, that enables both parties to claim achievement.
“Right now, those actors are not there.”
Washington, which has helped broker previous cease-fires, is consumed with other crises, and has diminished credibility in the Middle East. Egypt, which during the brief presidency of Mohamed Morsi strongly supported Hamas, now treats the group as an enemy, and is loath to let its rivals Qatar and Turkey play a significant diplomatic role to aid residents of Gaza.
That leaves President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, an adversary of both Israel and Hamas, as the primary Palestinian interlocutor. Weak at home but increasingly active on the international stage, he shuttled from Cairo to Istanbul on Friday for what were described as cease-fire negotiations.
“The fact that Abbas is involved this time, unlike all previous cases, could mean something,” said Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian pollster and analyst. “He does not have a lot of leverage here, but the little he has might allow for a three-way deal — Hamas, Abbas and the Israelis. That’s the way things might be smoother than to wait for the battlefield itself to determine the outcome, which could take a very, very long time, and a great deal of bloodshed.”
The bloodshed continued Friday as an artillery shell killed three children of Ismail Abu Musalam in their bedroom near the northern entry to Gaza around noon — the third day in a row in which groups of youths were killed — and another shell killed eight members of the Abu Jarad family, four of them children, at night. The Palestinian death toll topped 280, plus 2,000 wounded, as airstrikes continued over the relatively contained ground operations.
