ABSTRACT
New York Times reporting, based on interviews with Hamas leaders in Gaza, portrays the group as seeking to re-establish itself as a military force and the Palestinians’ primary agent of violent confrontation, as opposed to Gaza’s caretaker, and to decisively reinvigorate the armed struggle with Israel by creating a ‘permanent’ state of war. The secular Palestinian Authority (PA), Hamas’s sclerotic political nemesis with which Israel has had an uneasy security partnership, condemned the attack. The PA tried to negate the results, but Hamas killed or ejected its operatives and exerted a tight grip on Gazan society. The United States has two strategic interests related to the Gaza crisis: a geopolitical interest in preventing the conflict from widening; and a reputational interest in forestalling an even worse humanitarian catastrophe. The Israelis intend to chew through as much of Gaza as necessary to capture or kill Hamas leaders and fighters, destroy its subsurface infrastructure and dismantle its missile factories.
