Dust-covered tanks and armored bulldozers were winched onto transporters and driven out of the same groves of straggly eucalyptus where they camped in January 2009 before going in.

That conflict cost more than 1,400 lives, all but 13 Palestinian, while this time, some 160 Palestinians were killed in eight days of fighting, against six Israelis.

Hamas nevertheless declared it had come out on top.

“From the lion’s den, we declare victory,” said Abu Ubaida, spokesman of Hamas’ armed wing, Izz el-Deen Al-Qassam Brigades. Israel’s “security hallucination” had been exposed.

Islamist militants launched more than 700 rockets from Gaza by the end of October, Israel said, to explain its decision to set off the latest conflict by killing Hamas’s top military commander with a precision strike from an F16 fighter jet.

Psychologically and in propaganda terms, the long-range rockets Hamas fired all the way towards Tel Aviv and Jerusalem over the past eight days were a game-changer, celebrated by Gazans who were also relieved the invasion never came.

But 84 percent of Gaza’s rockets were knocked out of the sky by Israel’s new Iron Dome interceptor defence, neutralising Hamas’ main weapon.

The Israeli army says Islamist fighters fired 1,500 rockets at Israel, both home made and smuggled from Iran, scoring two lethal hits. The same number of Israeli strikes killed 30 senior militiamen and blew up rockets, launchers and arms dumps.

The ceasefire agreement, Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak said, was “a paper bridge for the defeated so that they can explain to their public how they can even show their faces after what they were hit with for a week”.

The truce, arranged by Egypt, “could last nine months. It could last nine weeks. And when it no longer continues we will know what to do,” Barak said.

Tanks, self-propelled artillery, armored personnel carriers and Humvees were lined up in some of the same fields they used four years ago, when they did invade, Israel’s blue and white flag flying from their radio masts.

They will be pulled out in the next day or so farmers can get back to work.

At Kerem Shalom, on the border with Egypt and Gaza, trucks carrying international food aid were rolling again on Thursday into a terminal where freight is re-loaded onto Palestinian trucks for 1.2 million people in Gaza who depend on it.

Empty buses were coming down Route 232, which runs parallel to the Gaza street from north to south, to pick up soldiers no doubt relieved to know they would not have to go in.

In 2009, after a week of aerial bombing and long-range shelling, this country road with kibbutz farms on either side was the launch point for some 30,000 troops and armour that cut the Gaza Strip in two.

Israel is a small country and the frontline is only 70 km (40 miles) from Tel Aviv. The army could be back in place in little more than half a day if needed.

The truce will test the intense distrust between Israel and the Islamist movement that runs Gaza, but both sides had a clear interest it not prolonging the conflict.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to cease fire just hours after a bomb exploded on a Tel Aviv bus, prompting opposition charges of weakness but winning international credit he may seek to draw on in Israel’s standoff with Iran, whose disputed nuclear program he considers an existential threat.

“I don’t hanker to go back in to Gaza. I’m persuaded that Hamas has no hankering to repeat what happened to it over the last week, and ditto Islamic Jihad,” Barak told Israel radio.

Hamas had managed to fire one tonne of high explosive into Israel’s built-up areas, he said. Israel hit Gaza targets with around 1,000 tonnes.

“The time for restraint is over,” said Deputy Speaker Danny Danon of Netanyahu’s rightwing Likud party, after a blast that wounded 20 bus passengers and shocked a city just getting used to the idea of being in rocket range of the Gaza Strip.

“We must declare war on the terrorists wherever they may be,” Danon said.

A weekend poll by the daily Haaretz showed only 30 percent of Israelis supported invading the Palestinian enclave, though 84 percent back the week-old air force offensive against Hamas and other Islamist groups firing rockets at Israel.

That poll was before the bus bomb.

“We have to stop all these attacks, all this rocket fire. I would say we should wipe Gaza off the map, that’s where all the trouble comes from,” said Aliza Danino, 53, at a Jerusalem bus stop. “They should be wiped off the face of the earth.”

However, some Israelis were still leery of a full-scale invasion involving thousands of conscript soldiers and reserves.

“Definitely not,” said Ruth Barzilai, strolling by Jaffa port. “There are 75,000 reservists, with let’s say a family of four. That makes half a million people who will be in agony.”

“No,” said a middle-aged manager called Koby. “There would be too much risk, for us, and for them.”

More than 140 Palestinians have been killed in eight days of Israeli air strikes and five Israelis by rockets.

Israelis weren’t waiting for a police investigation to uncover who planted the explosives that wounded 15 bus passengers, three seriously, in the heart of their metropolis.

“This was a terrorist attack,” said a Netanyahu aide.

Hamas swiftly praised the bombing as a “natural response to the Israeli massacres” in Gaza. A Hamas spokesman, however referred to it as a “martyrdom operation”, assuming it was a suicide attack, which Israeli police said it was not.

NO FAITH IN CEASEFIRES

In southern Israel, which suffered alone through years of sporadic rocket attacks before Hamas dramatically brought Tel Aviv and Jerusalem into rocket range last week, many would like the army to go in and “finish the job”.

It was for these people, about one million Israelis, that Netanyahu says he launched Operation Pillar of Defense last Wednesday, well before Hamas proved it could threaten the three million living in greater Tel Aviv.

This swathe of sandy farmland and small towns lying just east of the 40 km (25 mile) long Gaza Strip enjoyed no real peace and security even after Israeli forces invaded Gaza in January 2009 at the climax of Operation Cast Lead.

Nor did Gaza, frequently targeted by Israeli air strikes in a cycle of low-level violence and reprisal.

An armored invasion force is now ranged along key points of the border, tanks pointed at Gaza awaiting orders. Hamas warns that the Israelis will take a lot more casualties than in Cast Lead, when 10 soldiers were killed, four by friendly fire.

“Fighting in built-up areas is challenging,” Israeli Army chief General Benny Gantz told troops in the south.

“It will not always be easy but the ability exists and when you go forward, go in, look back once and see what you are doing it for – Sderot, Ofakim and other villages – and from that point look only forward.”

Some in the southern towns say the only solution is the surrender or disarmament of the militants in the blockaded coastal strip where 1.7 million Palestinians live, most of them refugees from Israel’s creation in 1948 and their descendants.

“Since the last day of Operation Cast Lead (January 18, 2009) until the first day of Operation Pillar of Defense, the Gaza Hamas regime launched 2,000 aerial attacks against Israel,” writes Noam Bedein of the Sderot media centre.

“Truce with Hamas amounts to ‘we cease, they fire’.”

But many Israelis fear that a ground operation in crowded Gaza and the high civilian casualties it is likely to cause could provoke more bombing attacks in their big cities.

Israel would also face international condemnation as it did in 2009 from countries which say it uses disproportionate force against a weaker enemy.

Israel’s military said it killed 709 militants in the three-week Cast Lead war. Palestinian human rights workers counted 740 civilian dead. Three Israel civilians died in rocket fire.

“Once again this war is two months before an election,” said Tali Hayat, in Jaffa, referring to Cast Lead which also preceded a national poll. “Is it possible this is a coincidence?”

Netanyahu is favorite to win re-election on January 22. But any painful outcome of a high-risk incursion into Gaza could shift opinion. This is his first war as Israel’s leader.

(Reporting By Douglas Hamilton. Additional reporting by Allyn Fisher-Ilan and Crispian Balmer.)

Despite the fact its air force is bombarding the coastal enclave, Israel is trying to maintain the essential daily flow of basic foodstuffs into the Gaza Strip where most of 1.7 million Palestinians are dependent on aid.

A Twitter message from the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said that “120+ trucks of supplies from Israel are waiting at Gaza border crossing. Hamas is firing rockets at the crossing. Trucks can’t enter now”.

Israel says it launched its military offensive a week ago to halt increasing Islamist militant rocket fire on southern Israeli communities close to the Gaza Strip.

The Kerem Shalom crossing at the extreme south of the Israel-Gaza border, next to Egyptian territory, is the only freight passage into the blockaded territory.

No comment was available from Hamas. But a Palestinian liaison official said the crossing was closed after some mortar bombs landed at Kerem Shalom and work was suspended after just one hour of operations. The western-backed Palestinian Authority liaises with Israel on Kerem Shalom transfers.

For security reasons, it operates on a back-to-back system: trucks go in from Israel and offload within the protective concrete walls of the terminal, then trucks come in from the Gaza end and load up.

Since the start of the latest round of violence, now in its seventh day, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), says it has let in 123 trucks loaded with food, medicine and fuel, including 43 that passed on Tuesday before rockets started to fall.

The rest of the transfer included 16 truckloads of medical equipment “specifically vital equipment, such as medicines, anesthetics and disposable medical equipment”, COGAT said.

The main Israeli fortified crossing-point at Erez was opened to permit the exit of 26 patients and their escorts into Israel in order to receive medical treatment, the authority added.

“While Israel is committed to providing continued assistance, it is subject to the limitations created by continuous rocket fire and attacks on the part of Hamas and other extremists groups in Gaza,” COGAT said.

“Rocket attacks endanger the staff manning the crossing and often hinder or prevent the transfer of goods,” it added.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) says 1.2 million Gazans rely on UNRWA assistance, which enters the territory via Israel.

“UNRWA will continue to provide food aid to more than 800,000 refugees in the Strip. Our schools are providing a place of safe shelter. Our health clinics remain open and ready to bring medical care to the children, the sick, and the elderly,” the agency said in its latest update on the crisis.

In relatively normal times about 130 truckloads of aid — mainly bulk staples — go through the Kerem Shalom crossing daily.

(Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi; Editing by Giles Elgood)

More of Israel’s formidable Merkava tanks were on the way south to join the battle lineup on a plain of fertile farmland and fruit groves. Soldiers camped out next to their armor. The observant Orthodox Jews among them said their daily prayers.

Everyone is waiting to find out if it will be truce or war. Mediator Egypt says a deal to end the fighting could be close. Israel says it is prepared to move troops into Gaza but prefers a diplomatic solution.

In the Israeli town of Sderot, well in range of Palestinian rockets and mortars, the feeble shockwaves of a flurry of detonations jarred the ceiling as the local council met in a bomb shelter 6 meters (20 feet) underground to talk about the crisis.

Sderot has been here before. In December 2008 the same tank and bulldozer transporters were rumbling down Highway 34 past the sleepy town that has become synonymous in Israel with random rocket attacks, blast shelters and jangled nerves.

People are waiting to find out if there will be a re-run this time. Defiant rocket fire from Gaza drove many out in 2008 during a week of bombing from the air, artillery shelling and naval gunnery. Then Israel sent some 30,000 troops into Gaza.

The final toll was 1,400 Palestinians dead and 13 Israelis killed. Israel was condemned by some states for using “disproportionate force”.

“Many are wishing that our air force will carry on bombing (Islamist militant positions in Gaza). There is some fear of what an invasion will bring,” said Miryam Sassy of Sderot’s education board.

“There would be more violence, more bloodshed. But if we stop now we’ll be in the same situation again in one month or six months or a year.”

This is Israel’s dilemma from the moment the low-level Gaza conflict erupted into full-scale fighting six days ago. The Palestinian death toll is nearing 100, more than half of them civilians, according to Gaza health officials. Israel has had three civilians killed by a rocket.

Invasion would push the casualty figures higher. House-to- house combat would mean more civilian deaths.

The Islamist Hamas fighters of Gaza and their junior cohorts have newly-acquired weapons such as armor-busting anti-tank guided missiles to greet the Israeli invaders, conceivably killing many more than last time.

FALLOUT

The political fallout for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at home as well as abroad could be very negative. He is running for re-election in January. The impact at the ballot box of stopping before Hamas is effectively disarmed of its rockets could be almost as bad.

A ceasefire now may leave the Islamist forces still with plenty of rockets to threaten Israel in future, including long-range weapons that they have now proved can reach greater Tel Aviv, home to some three million people.

Hamas is an implacable enemy of “the Zionist occupier”. It denies Israel’s right to exist as a state and is pledged to take all of the land on which Israel was founded in 1948. It has spoken of a long-term truce, but never of a permanent peace.

Twelve-year-old boys in Sderot can tell the difference between a Palestinian rocket detonation and the sound of one being taken out in mid-air by Israel’s Iron Dome interceptor.

“You hear the final whoosh in the air when a rocket gets through,” said a boy at an outdoor cafe who played with his mobile phone during two detonations. “Those were Iron Dome.”

But he got up and moved to shelter when the raspy croak of Sderot’s alert signal sounded for a third time and a bang shook the ground. The warhead of the Gaza-made Qassam rocket is not powerful, but if you’re close enough it will kill you.

Iron Dome’s shield in the sky has been a game-changer. The army says it is knocking out 90 percent of incoming rockets that are targeted only if they are likely to hit residential areas.

Sderot’s police station has a weird collection of rusting, petaled iron tubes from the scores of rockets that have hit the town since Hamas took over Gaza in 2007 from the Western-backed Palestinian faction of President Mahmoud Abbas.

They served as a backdrop for Barack Obama when he made a speech at the station while touring Sderot during a visit to Israel as a candidate in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

Netanyahu says no country in the world would tolerate a constant drizzle of potentially lethal rockets on its citizens, traumatizing families with the threat of sudden death.

He has the sympathy of much of the West. But how long will that last if Gaza is once again overrun, enraging an Arab world no longer under the control of pro-Western autocrats but ruled by Islamists who support Hamas?

(Reporting By Douglas Hamilton, Editing by Jeffrey Heller)

The retired sea captain, once a guerrilla with the pre-state Jewish underground, carried his wooden stool with him, as well as a little cushion, for comfort.

The siren allows 90 seconds maximum to take shelter. It had gone silent by the time Emanuel, easing the bad knee where the bullet went through in 1948, got down in a corner of the wall, the Mediterranean Sea glinting lazily in the sunlight on the other side.

There was a double detonation in the sky somewhere over Jaffa, inland from the shore.

“That was two bangs,” he corroborated. Israel’s Iron Dome interceptor had knocked out two long-range rockets fired by Palestinian militants for the fourth time in four days.

He screwed up his eyes and looked up at a lingering twist of white smoke and vapor trailing in the sky above the old Arab town of quiet lanes and little stone mosques, now a Tel Aviv district. It was the only trace of the war to the south.

BACKGAMMON

“There will never be a solution to this,” Emanuel says.

Sitting outside his cramped workshop in an ancient wooden freight wagon from Belgian railways, he casts his mind back a long way.

“I went to Gaza when I was eight on a school trip,” he says. That would have been in 1936. “They threw stones at us and I got a bad cut in the forehead. Look.”

It’s hard to pick out the faint star of an old wound in his wrinkled brow. He moves on.

“I was in the Palmach, when we fought the British and the Arabs, you know?” The Palmach was the elite strike force of the underground Haganah at the time of the British mandate in what was then Palestine.

“It was the British who screwed this up. They should have divided the land between the Jews and the Arabs but they didn’t.”

The United Nations voted in 1947 to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Rejecting this, the Arabs went to war, and were beaten back by the Jews who, on the war’s conclusion, founded the State of Israel on expanded borders.

“I didn’t agree with that. But our government agreed.”

“And then of course I was in the 1948 war, and got wounded,” he says, squeezing his knee. The war that created the state of Israel, he means – when many Arabs were expelled from Jaffa and some ended up as refugees in Gaza.

Emanuel’s big sculpture “Boat”, carved out of steely grey basalt from the valley of the Sea of Galilee, sits in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Older now and with a bad shoulder, he carves smaller sculptures in his railway wagon and watches the world go by.

Sunday was the fourth straight day of sirens followed by explosions in the greater Tel Aviv area, as Gaza’s militants display their new menace in the form of rockets that can reach the Israeli metropolis, or at least its southern end.

Startled Israelis strolling along the popular Jaffa promenade don’t know where to run for safety. There are no bomb shelters like in the towns down south next to Gaza where Palestinian rockets have been a fact of life for eight years.

They stop, then hear the bang, and look up at the sky and point. Then stroll back to their cars or take another photograph of the kids by the seaside.

Old men who daily play backgammon and fish from the seawall don’t bother much to jump for cover when the siren goes. Or they crouch a bit, on creaky knees.

“This will go on forever,” says Emanuel.

(Reporting By Douglas Hamilton; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Or, from another perspective, cynical Israeli politicians think a Gaza offensive will be a walkover that will assure re-election in January and at the same time provide a death-blow to Palestinian statehood moves at the United Nations.

Those are two ends of a spectrum of theories among Israelis and Palestinians about what has propelled the two sides towards their second war in four years, escalating a low-level, slap-for-slap conflict to the brink of an Israeli invasion of Gaza.

Without going back 2,000 years to the origins of the dispute, the roots of the latest high-explosive crisis can be traced in a series of “red lines” that have been crossed.

Specifically: firing a Russian Kornet anti-tank missile on November 10 against Israeli soldiers; Israel’s assassination of top Hamas commander Ahmed Al-Jaabari on November 14 after both sides appeared to have agreed to a tacit ceasefire deal, and then Hamas firing long-range rockets at Tel Aviv on November 15.

These were big steps that wrecked a fragile status quo.

RULES OF THE GAME

Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip seven years ago and has regularly used its airpower to deter Hamas and other Islamist groups from firing their rockets into the Jewish state. The militants do not recognise Israel’s right to exist.

In a bruising 2008-2009 three-week campaign, Israel first bombarded then briefly invaded Gaza, hoping to put a halt to the rockets for once and all. Operation Cast Lead left 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead.

For a while, there was quiet, then the round of retaliations resumed. Missiles were fired, Israel struck back, sometimes targeting empty smuggling tunnels, sometimes targeting rocket crews. Palestinian civilians were also getting killed.

Both sides speak of “the rules of the game”. And now both sides accuse the other of “stepping over the red line”.

Palestinian analysts agree Hamas has the wind in its sails since the Arab Spring swept away pro-Western autocracies and replaced them with Islamists, especially in neighbouring Egypt where the ruling Muslim Brotherhood is their spiritual mentor.

“Of course, Hamas feels empowered by the change in the Arab countries around them and many believe Israel cannot isolate it any more,” said a source close to Hamas who did not wish to be identified.

But while Hamas craves the legitimacy it needs to assume moral leadership of the Palestinian national movement from those it considers Western poodles chasing peace with Israel, it shares Gaza with armed salafist groups intent on violence.

“Hamas has been under continuous blackmail from other factions since it has been more interested in calm in order to preserve its authority in Gaza,” Hani Habib, a political analyst in Gaza told Reuters.

CHANGING THE RULES

Trying to face both ways, Hamas abandoned efforts to stop these groups firing rockets at Israel and last month joined in, to show it was not getting soft in the chair of office.

In so doing, it tried to change “the rules of the game” but overplayed its hand, triggering a massive Israeli operation for which the military planning was sitting ready in a drawer. It came far faster and much heavier than Hamas expected.

“While they thought revolutions in Arab countries served their aims and would make them stronger, they were not looking for war with Israel, not now, despite the fact they have been preparing themselves for one since the 2009 round ended,” said the source close to Hamas.

For Israel, a security situation that had been contained and politically tolerable — zero or very infrequent rocket attacks on the south by groups other than Hamas — tilted with Hamas’ decision to start shooting again, and with new weapons.

Israel says the aim of Operation Pillar of Defence is not to re-occupy Gaza, or root out Islamists. It is to destroy long-range rockets such as the Fajr 5 from Iran that Hamas has acquired since 2009 and to disable Gaza’s rocket capacity “for a very long time”, said foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor.

Could there be ancillary motives? Alastair Newton at Nomura Global Markets writes in a note to clients that “militants in Gaza have been building up stocks of missiles…and there does appear to have been an up-tick in missile attacks”.

“However,” he adds, “an Israeli general election is now just two months away … Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party has historically benefited from pre-election security concerns, which this latest conflict is likely to exacerbate.”

Although a vast majority of Israelis supports the operation, a high body count could reduce popular backing.

Another vote is also looming — one that the secular government of President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank wants to bring in the United Nations General Assembly by the end of November to give the Palestinians a diplomatic upgrade.

Israel says this drive for U.N. recognition of a state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem is “diplomatic terrorism”. It has threatened to topple Abbas, who is regularly derided by Hamas for not supporting their armed resistance.

Abbas himself is convinced the Gaza campaign is designed to sink his initiative, but has vowed to plough on. “Everything that is happening is in order to block our endeavours to reach the United Nations,” he said on Friday.

Israeli columnist Uri Dromi says Israel should remember that its Palestinian neighbours in the West Bank “are still committed to a two-state solution, namely, sharing the neighbourhood”.

“If we lose them, then we are left with the others only.”

WHY THE KORNET?

Hamas has courted Egyptian support assiduously since the election of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi in June. Mursi, however, has so far made clear that while denouncing Israeli “aggression” he will not go beyond diplomatic pressure.

The nuances of Gaza’s militant politics are fine but provide some clues as to how the showdown has escalated.

“Hamas did not claim the Kornet hitting the (Israeli army) jeep. The Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) did,” said the source close to Hamas. “It is true Hamas did not condemn it.”

He did not deny that Hamas wanted to change the rules of the game whereby Israel decides when a round of violence will end.

“But assassinating Jaabari was like giving the go-ahead to all Hamas cells to use the equipment, weapons and training they had prepared for a possible war,” he said.

Hamas official and columnist Mustafa Assawaf said Hamas was “not interested in silence forever, or a big escalation”. A shaky new truce was in place thanks to Egyptian mediation, he noted, when Jaabari ventured out fatally onto Gaza’s streets.

“Israel did not respect deals and understandings and after killing Jaabari tough reactions were inevitable even if it would lead to broader confrontation,” he said.

Hamas used greater force to “establish a new formula that Israel is not the only party that owns power and that the resistance has its own tools that can be painful to Israel”.

Assawaf rejected the suggestion that an internal leadership struggle within the movement motivated the rocket gamble.

“Hamas leaders are competing, but not for seats. They are competing for who dies as a martyr and gets into a coffin.”

(Additional reporting by Noah Browning. Writing by Douglas Hamilton. Editing by Crispian Balmer and Jason Webb)

Or, from another perspective, cynical Israeli politicians think a Gaza offensive will be a walkover that will assure re-election in January and at the same time provide a death-blow to Palestinian statehood moves at the United Nations.

Those are two ends of a spectrum of theories among Israelis and Palestinians about what has propelled the two sides towards their second war in four years, escalating a low-level, slap-for-slap conflict to the brink of an Israeli invasion of Gaza.

Without going back 2,000 years to the origins of the dispute, the roots of the latest high-explosive crisis can be traced in a series of “red lines” that have been crossed.

Specifically: firing a Russian Kornet anti-tank missile on November 10 against Israeli soldiers; Israel’s assassination of top Hamas commander Ahmed Al-Jaabari on November 14 after both sides appeared to have agreed to a tacit ceasefire deal, and then Hamas firing long-range rockets at Tel Aviv on November 15.

These were big steps that wrecked a fragile status quo.

RULES OF THE GAME

Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip seven years ago and has regularly used its airpower to deter Hamas and other Islamist groups from firing their rockets into the Jewish state. The militants do not recognise Israel’s right to exist.

In a bruising 2008-2009 three-week campaign, Israel first bombarded then briefly invaded Gaza, hoping to put a halt to the rockets for once and all. Operation Cast Lead left 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead.

For a while, there was quiet, then the round of retaliations resumed. Missiles were fired, Israel struck back, sometimes targetting empty smuggling tunnels, sometimes targetting rocket crews. Palestinian civilians were also getting killed.

Both sides speak of “the rules of the game”. And now both sides accuse the other of “stepping over the red line”.

Palestinian analysts agree Hamas has the wind in its sails since the Arab Spring swept away pro-Western autocracies and replaced them with Islamists, especially in neighbouring Egypt where the ruling Muslim Brotherhood is their spiritual mentor.

“Of course, Hamas feels empowered by the change in the Arab countries around them and many believe Israel cannot isolate it any more,” said a source close to Hamas who did not wish to be identified.

But while Hamas craves the legitimacy it needs to assume moral leadership of the Palestinian national movement from those it considers Western poodles chasing peace with Israel, it shares Gaza with armed salafist groups intent on violence.

“Hamas has been under continuous blackmail from other factions since it has been more interested in calm in order to preserve its authority in Gaza,” Hani Habib, a political analyst in Gaza told Reuters.

CHANGING THE RULES

Trying to face both ways, Hamas abandoned efforts to stop these groups firing rockets at Israel and last month joined in, to show it was not getting soft in the chair of office.

In so doing, it tried to change “the rules of the game” but overplayed its hand, triggering a massive Israeli operation for which the military planning was sitting ready in a drawer. It came far faster and much heavier than Hamas expected.

“While they thought revolutions in Arab countries served their aims and would make them stronger, they were not looking for war with Israel, not now, despite the fact they have been preparing themselves for one since the 2009 round ended,” said the source close to Hamas.

For Israel, a security situation that had been contained and politically tolerable — zero or very infrequent rocket attacks on the south by groups other than Hamas — tilted with Hamas’ decision to start shooting again, and with new weapons.

Israel says the aim of Operation Pillar of Defence is not to re-occupy Gaza, or root out Islamists. It is to destroy long-range rockets such as the Fajr 5 from Iran that Hamas has acquired since 2009 and to disable Gaza’s rocket capacity “for a very long time”, said foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor.

Could there be ancillary motives? Alastair Newton at Nomura Global Markets writes in a note to clients that “militants in Gaza have been building up stocks of missiles…and there does appear to have been an up-tick in missile attacks”.

“However,” he adds, “an Israeli general election is now just two months away … Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party has historically benefited from pre-election security concerns, which this latest conflict is likely to exacerbate.”

Although a vast majority of Israelis supports the operation, a high body count could reduce popular backing.

Another vote is also looming — one that the secular government of President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank wants to bring in the United Nations General Assembly by the end of November to give the Palestinians a diplomatic upgrade.

Israel says this drive for U.N. recognition of a state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem is “diplomatic terrorism”. It has threatened to topple Abbas, who is regularly derided by Hamas for not supporting their armed resistance.

Abbas himself is convinced the Gaza campaign is designed to sink his initiative, but has vowed to plough on. “Everything that is happening is in order to block our endeavours to reach the United Nations,” he said on Friday.

Israeli columnist Uri Dromi says Israel should remember that its Palestinian neighbours in the West Bank “are still committed to a two-state solution, namely, sharing the neighbourhood”.

“If we lose them, then we are left with the others only.”

WHY THE KORNET?

Hamas has courted Egyptian support assiduously since the election of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi in June. Mursi, however, has so far made clear that while denouncing Israeli “aggression” he will not go beyond diplomatic pressure.

The nuances of Gaza’s militant politics are fine but provide some clues as to how the showdown has escalated.

“Hamas did not claim the Kornet hitting the (Israeli army) jeep. The Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) did,” said the source close to Hamas. “It is true Hamas did not condemn it.”

He did not deny that Hamas wanted to change the rules of the game whereby Israel decides when a round of violence will end.

“But assassinating Jaabari was like giving the go-ahead to all Hamas cells to use the equipment, weapons and training they had prepared for a possible war,” he said.

Hamas official and columnist Mustafa Assawaf said Hamas was “not interested in silence forever, or a big escalation”. A shaky new truce was in place thanks to Egyptian mediation, he noted, when Jaabari ventured out fatally onto Gaza’s streets.

“Israel did not respect deals and understandings and after killing Jaabari tough reactions were inevitable even if it would lead to broader confrontation,” he said.

Hamas used greater force to “establish a new formula that Israel is not the only party that owns power and that the resistance has its own tools that can be painful to Israel”.

Assawaf rejected the suggestion that an internal leadership struggle within the movement motivated the rocket gamble.

“Hamas leaders are competing, but not for seats. They are competing for who dies as a martyr and gets into a coffin.”

(Additional reporting by Noah Browning. Writing by Douglas Hamilton. Editing by Crispian Balmer and Jason Webb)

The latest threat – Palestinian rockets from the Gaza Strip
- is something new, but in a sense familiar.

Some in the throbbing metropolis strung out along on
Israel’s sandy Mediterranean shores kept their cool on Friday,
after sirens wailed and another explosion was heard, the second
in 24 hours. No one was hurt.

Israel was throttling back for the sleepy sabbath weekend,
and the freeways were humming with homebound traffic. About 40
percent of Israelis, more than three million people, live and
work in Tel Aviv and the urban sprawl around it.

A surfing initiation class was out, practising paddling in
slack water as girls in cutoffs and flip-flops got out of the
way of muscled guys on mountain bikes on the crowded cycle path.

The distant high-altitude rumble of warplanes mixed with the
breeze from the sea as the sun sank beneath the horizon.

“Israelis are very cool. We’re used to living with this sort
of stuff,” said Federico Broedner of Freddy’s Havana cigar shop
in the heart of the city not far from the U.S. embassy – the
seashore five-star hotel belt.

“People are glad they (the military) are doing something
about it (the rocket threat from Gaza),” he said.

“My local customers are cool but the foreigners are worried.
One man had a panic attack and ran out of the shop when we heard
the explosion.”

In fact, some residents on Thursday and Friday were either
too laid-back to care or not awake yet to the fact that this was
not a drill, that the Palestinian rocketeers of Gaza finally
have the city in their range, if not their sights.

Palestinians, and even many Israelis, believe some Tel Aviv
residents are blind to the realities of the conflict.

In Gaza, at least 14 Palestinian civilians have been killed
by Israeli strikes since the conflict escalated on Wednesday.
Three Israeli civilians were killed by a rocket attack on
Thursday in a town well to the south of Tel Aviv, where
rocketing has become commonplace.

“A WEEK OR TEN DAYS”

Thousands of rockets have been fired at southern Israel
since Hamas took over the enclave in 2007. Israel invaded Gaza
in the winter of 2008-2009 to stop the rocket fire, a war in
which 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed. Rocketing
stopped for a few years but resumed again in 2012.

This is the first time that Islamist Hamas militants in Gaza
have fired rockets with sufficient range to reach Tel Aviv and
its outlying dormitory cities. None of the gleaming office
towers that reflect the setting sun has been scratched.

Hamas, which also targeted Jerusalem on Friday, is gambling
with a game-changing move.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said the militants would
be made to pay. A lethal strike on Tel Aviv would probably
trigger an Israeli invasion.

Tel Aviv residents who remember the Gulf War 20 years ago
say the rockets still seem less dangerous than Saddam’s Scuds,
when Israelis wore gas masks in case the Iraqi leader topped his
missiles with chemical warheads.

A nationwide early-warning system alerts Israelis to
incoming rockets. Homes and offices have blast-proof rooms to
retreat to within 30 seconds of the wail of sirens.

Those caught outside lie flat on the ground. Drivers get out
of their cars and crouch or lie by the roadside until they hear
an impact or an all-clear.

The new “Iron Dome” interceptor system is successfully
tracking launches from Gaza and knocking out many of those
rockets that look as if they might hit residential areas.

“Tel Aviv is on a normal footing. You can go to the beach,
or to the movies,” a spokesman for the military’s civil defence
command said on Israeli television after the latest rocket
attack on the city. “After an explosion is heard, you can get
back to normal 10 minutes later.”

The tacit truce arrested an escalation to all-out fighting, but both sides remain armed and primed for another round in the unresolved conflict that has festered since Hamas Islamist militants took over the enclave in 2007.

Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister of Gaza’s Hamas government, praised the main armed factions in the enclave for agreeing on Monday night to a truce.

“They showed a high sense of responsibility by saying they would respect calm should the Israeli occupation also abide by it,” he said.

Haniyeh spoke during an unannounced visit to a hospital to see wounded Palestinians. Some Israeli leaders say it is time to resume the controversial tactic of assassinating Hamas leaders.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu consulted his inner circle of ministers in Jerusalem. One of them, Benny Begin, said the flare-up had subsided but the conflict was far from resolved.

“This round of firing appears to have ended and things must be looked at soberly without illusions for both sides,” he said.

“Action must be taken following much thought and I think this is what the prime minister is doing,” he told Israel Radio.

“TIME TO ACT”

Three Palestinian fighters and four civilians have been killed by Israeli fire since Saturday, and 40 others wounded. Eight Israeli civilians were injured by some of the 115 rockets fired from Gaza and four soldiers were wounded by the anti-tank missile that hit their jeep and fuelled the fighting.

An official involved in the Egyptian mediation confirmed both sides were ready to stop.

“The message was clear and Israel too told Egypt they were not interested in escalation if rocket firing stopped. The situation now is calm for calm and I hope it does not deteriorate,” the official told Reuters

Israel struck three targets in the Gaza Strip in the early hours of Tuesday, including what the army said was a weapons depot and two rocket launch sites. There were no casualties.

Only one Palestinian rocket strike was reported in Israel by 10.00 a.m. (0800 GMT) on Tuesday.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak told reporters Israel was not prepared to forgive and forget following four days of violence.

“The matter has definitely not ended and we will decide how and when to act at the time when there will be a need,” he said.

Israel has shown little appetite for a new Gaza war, which could strain relations with the new Islamist-rooted government in neighboring Egypt. The countries made peace in 1979.

But Netanyahu will be reluctant to seem weak ahead of a January 22 election that opinion polls currently predict he will win.

“SAFETY NET”

Hamas is emboldened by the rise to power in Egypt of its spiritual mentors in the Muslim Brotherhood whom it views as a “safety net” that would stop an all-out Israeli onslaught.

The Palestinian Islamist movement believes it now presents a challenge that Israel’s military superiority cannot easily best.

“This assault and other assaults by the occupation will not break the will of the Palestinian people and their steadfastness in the face of barbaric Israeli attacks,” Haniyeh said.

Israel invaded Gaza in their last war in January 2009 in which 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed. International critics said Israel used “disproportionate force”.

Strategists say there is no obvious military solution to the conflict, barring re-occupation of a territory Israel held from 1967 to the unilateral withdrawal of 2005. And re-occupation would be a security nightmare.

Hamas, ruling 1.7 million Gazans, does not recognize Israel and pledged to win all of Israeli territory by force for the Palestinians. Its stand is in stark contrast to the U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which recognizes Israel and is ready to make permanent peace in return for a state.

The gulf between them poses a seemingly insoluble obstacle to the goal of a peace treaty establishing a Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital.

(Additional reporting by Ori Lewis in Jerusalem; Writing by Douglas Hamilton; Editing by Giles Elgood)

The Israeli army fired into Syria on Monday for the second day in a row, after a Syrian mortar round from fighting across the disengagement line hit the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.

Sunday’s Israeli missile was a warning shot. Monday’s tankfire scored a direct hit, the army said. There was no immediate word on any casualties. But it was the “message” Israel had warned would come.

“There were five incidents of supposed errant fire from small arms or mortars,” Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon told Army Radio on Monday before the second incident.

“We sent verbal messages. This didn’t help. So yesterday, for the first time, we sent a physical message,” he added. “If the message was understood, good. If the message was not understood, we will need to send other messages of the kind.”

Syrian rebels fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad have been fighting his army for months in towns inside and adjacent to the Area of Separation between Israel and Syria, along the disengagement line drawn at the end of their 1973 war.

Technically they are still at war, but it is a cold war.

For almost 40 years the Golan has been one of Israel’s quietest fronts, and despite the close-up view of the Syrian civil war they now have from windy Golan outposts, Israeli generals are not expecting things to heat up in the north.

“In my estimation, there is almost no doubt that he has no interest in opening a front,” Yaalon said of the beleaguered President Assad. “All he needs now would be for us to hit him.”

But down south, real war clouds are gathering over the Gaza Strip, the blockaded coastal enclave from where Islamist Palestinian fighters are firing rockets at Israel, and in return are being picked off by Israeli air force strikes.

“In the past month, over 20 terrorists and some civilians have been killed in the Gaza Strip and dozens have been wounded,” Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said on Sunday. “The shooting has not stopped even today, even at this hour.”

NO REFEREE

Unlike the Golan, where 1,000 United Nations peacekeepers patrol the farmland and hills separating Syrian and Israeli army positions, Gaza has no referee to keep the peace. It is fenced off, but the Israel army patrols both sides of the fence.

In December of 2008, repeated rocket fire that was spreading fear and misery among communities in southern Israel triggered an Israeli onslaught. Operation Cast Lead began with a week of bombing and shelling, followed up by a ground offensive.

Some 1,400 Palestinians were killed, the majority civilians, and 13 Israelis lost their lives. Israel was strongly condemned by critics who called it a disproportionate use of force.

But after a years-long spell of relative calm, the low-level conflict with Gaza has intensified this year, with waves of retaliatory violence flaring ever more frequently.

The last burst was just two weeks ago. Ominously, the Islamist Hamas movement, which rules the enclave and dominates smaller militant groups, has stopped trying to keep the peace and reverted to firing its own rockets along with Islamic Jihad and others.

Barak says the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will respond.

“Under my instruction the IDF … is exploring the possibilities of increasing the response to Hamas and the other terror groups and we will hit the terror groups at an ever-growing pace,” he said on Sunday.

“If we are forced to go back into Gaza in order to hit Hamas and restore calm, we will not hesitate to do so.”

Helped by Iran and the flourishing contraband trade through tunnels from Egypt, Gaza militias have smuggled in better weapons since the war of 2008-09, including longer-range Grad rockets and anti-tank missiles, one of which they fired last week at an IDF patrol vehicle.

But Gaza’s estimated 35,000 Palestinian fighters are still no match for Israel’s F-16 fighter-bombers, Apache helicopter gunships, Merkava tanks and other modern weapons systems in the hands of a conscript force of 175,000, with 450,000 in reserve.

Yet this massive deterrent is not working.

HAMAS UPS ANTE

Yaalon says there is no “bang and we’re done” solution to a Gaza enclave ruled by a group which refuses to accept Israel’s right to exist and demonstrates its commitment to “resistance” by fighting, even if it courts a hammer blow.

But in the past, the minister said, “targeted killings of Hamas leadership brought months of quiet”. Quoting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he said: “We will need to toughen our response until Hamas will say ‘enough’ and end the fire.”

On Monday, with stormy weather perhaps helping to keep a lid on further clashes, an official in Gaza said Egypt was once again stepping into the breach to mediate a ceasefire.

“Nothing has yet been formalized. Israel and Hamas maintain their usual position: calm for calm and escalation for escalation,” he said. “Egypt is trying to get Islamic Jihad and others to stop rockets in return for Israel stopping strikes.”

Hamas has been emboldened by the Arab Spring, which toppled the Western-backed Hosni Mubarak and placed Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood of President Mohamed Mursi. He has kept his distance from Israel, though he has not endorsed Hamas attacks.

“War against Gaza is no longer a picnic,” Youssef Rizqa, an adviser to Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, wrote in Felesteen newspaper of the region’s new diplomatic environment.

“The Gaza question has become confusing for leaders of the occupation state. There is no real answer to the Gaza question.”

Mursi was now Gaza’s “safety net”, he wrote, quoting the Egyptian president’s recent pledge that “we will not allow a new war on Gaza and Palestinian blood is our blood”.

There might be more Israeli assassination attempts on Hamas leaders, he said, but another all-out invasion was unlikely.

If that is the Hamas calculation, it is a risky gamble.

On Sunday, a Jewish family had a narrow escape when a rocket from Gaza hit their house, and a motorist was hurt when another nearly blew his car off the road. If a rocket should, say, hit a school and kill children, Israel’s reaction would be ferocious.

The same sort of tripwire is strung along the Golan Heights, where another Syrian mortar round hit the Israeli side of the disengagement line on Monday. It exploded harmlessly.

Had it inflicted casualties, Israel would have fired back in earnest. But there would be no invasion of Syria on the agenda.

(Additional reporting by Ari Rabinovitch in Jerusalem and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)