Captain, our captain

When I started working at Haaretz in the summer of 2005, young and fresh out of university, on the eve of the disengagement from Gaza, I knew to expect at least one phone call each shift, one that would either throw me into fear or reassure me that I was in the right place. And there it was, the gruff British accent, no formal greeting other than a bellow through the line: "Who's in charge?" There was no choice those early days, those late night shifts, but to squeak: "I am."

The gruff was always David Landau, the British born editor of Haaretz, the founder of our English edition. Sometimes he called to scold, to criticize, to scream even, and often he just called to say 'well done,' a compliment which lingers still today.

It was never clear which message he'd have, and every phone call bore trepidation. He was a man who intimidated and impressed at once, inspired and encouraged, made young and eager writers like myself realize that there is a place for us in Israel, in journalism here. He was raised in the U.K., gave birth to Haaretz's English edition, and despite all religious and linguistic differences, became the editor in chief of the paper's Hebrew edition from 2004-2008.

He was the Godfather of Anglo journalism in Israel, the former editor of the website, Sara Miller, told me tonight. A better description would be hard to find.

David died tonight from a long and terminal illness. He will be missed, but not forgotten.

Gaza war over, Israel must focus on Syria border and the changing power play in the Middle East

Within 12 hours of a cease-fire signed with Gaza, ending 50 days of drawn-out war, Israel awoke last week to another immediate reality on its northern border: Mortar shells errantly lobbed by rebel forces clashing with President Bashar Assad's army, landed inside Israel's Golan Heights multiple times as rebels and Syrian forces enclosed their battles near the Quneitra crossing. Five days on, the Gaza war has been forgotten and Israeli interest has turned northward.

Israel's defense establishment is concerned by the heated battles along the Syrian border, but it is unlikely that the spillover from the north will result in any sort of persistent attacks or war. The battles along the Golan border are of yet contained and focused on Syrian territory, with no intelligence pointing at intentional crossover into Israel. Nevertheless, especially as United Nations forces controlling the border fall directly into the field of fighting, Israel is on alert and receptive.

The Quneitra border crossing, the only gate between Syria and Israel, was overtaken late last week by rebel forces comprising both the composite militias of secular fighters under the title of the former Free Syrian Army and jihadists aligned to the Al-Qaida linked Nusra Front. Quneitra is the sole crossing between Syria and Israel, and the territory near the border has been largely controlled over the last few months by Nusra rebels, who have an unconfirmed and silent gentleman's agreement with Israel to abstain from any infiltrations into its territory. The Syrian army has been fighting to retake the border, but the rebel forces are still in control.

Reports over the last months indicate that Nusra fighters were among the Syrian casualties treated by Israel both at its field hospital on the border and inside the territory over the last year, an indication of this silent security pact. Regardless of official confirmation of such a volatile agreement, the Israeli Golan remains safe from intentional attacks as the Syrian civil war, now shadowed by the presence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, remains on the other side of the border.

Nusra is no friend of Israel – it is an Al-Qaida entity, with Jihadist intentions, a brutal army with relentless means of war. But it is also not ISIS (the Islamic State), from which it declared distance earlier this year. ISIS envisions global jihad, having already secured large territories in Syria and Iraq, toward both the Jordanian and Turkish borders. Its forces near the Golan border are small, located in nearby villages but not upon Israeli territory. Nusra comprises mainly fighters from Syria, jihadis and anti-Israel, not bent on entering or conquering the territory south of the border, but rather on fighting Assad forces and ensuring their control within Syria and its borders.

Since the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Quneitra crossing has been manned by the United Nations Disengagement Observatory Force (UNDOF). Late last week, following seizure of the crossing, the Nusra Front challenged UNDOF forces and demanded a handover of weapons. Forty-three UN soldiers, mainly from Fiji, adhered and were taken hostage. Another 81 UN soldiers, from the Philippines, refused surrender and barricaded themselves inside their position. On Saturday, Syrian reports emerged that dozens of the UN hostages were secured release by European forces (Irish) and made entry into Israel. Dozens still remain.

Israel is an integral component in deals pertaining to international elements harmed or abducted in Syria: Aside from the aforementioned treatment of wounded fighters and confirmed civilians from Syria, and the opening of its borders to freed UN and international elements, it also last week served as the crossing point for American journalist Pete Theo Curtis, who was freed via Qatar intervention after nearly two years in ISIS captivity. Israel's border with Syria is closed, opened in the last 30 years only to Druze citizens studying in Damascus or crossing over to marry in the northern country, and to the export of apples grown in the Golan. Israel wants this border to remain closed, for obvious security reasons, but is willing to engage itself in efforts for the safety of international forces and foreign journalists.

Israel's northern border is relatively safe of now, but the events on the Syrian side cannot be extracted from the developments both militarily and financially in the region, proving a change to the balance of power in the Middle East. Israel is fresh out of war, the Gaza Strip has yet to be rehabilitated or relieved of its years-long siege on air, sea and land ports. Southern communities along the Gaza border are at ill-ease, war-torn, and uncertain of their future security. Along with these considerations, Israel must now focus on its northern border, the strength of the rebel forces on the other side and the well-enforced entities guiding them financially.

Qatar, a small country with global financial and mediatory aspirations, is fighting to become a regional power. Along with Saudi Arabia, it is a crucial force in the containment and funding of Islamist entities in the Middle East. It attempted to mediate the truce between Israel and Gaza, but was overshadowed by Egypt. Its vociferous intentions to enter the role of major regional player should not be ignored however, despite its funding of Hamas and reported support of the Qaida-backed Nusra.

Israel would do well to take advantage of opportunity with Qatar, to secure both financial and security stability. There is no chance of diplomatic relations between the two countries: the gulf state is Islamic and funds anti-Israel elements. Nonetheless, Qatar wants to replace Saudi Arabia as the central force in the region. It is small, but determined. Israel should seize its chance with Qatar's aspirations to ensure not only security with Gaza, but the northern border as well.

World attention is now on ISIS and its brutalities, but a significant battle is being fought on Syria's border with Israel, and the rebel forces in control there. This is not global jihad, but a battle for Syria, a civil war that has already resulted in hundreds of thousands dead and 3 million refugees. Israel has involved itself in extracting hostages and wounded through its borders, safely distancing itself from military battle with forces on the other side. With a new Middle East order upon us, the question now is where and how Israel will react and with whom it will ally. The main concern for Israel must be safety along all borders, by whatever means necessary.

Dead or alive, Deif assassination attempt was a victory for Israel

The question of whether Hamas' military commander Mohammed Deif was indeed assassinated in the attack on his ostensible hideout in Gaza City Tuesday night has still not been answered, but the attempt itself scored Israel two major points: It proved the drastic improvement of Israel's intelligence capabilities in the Gaza Strip, narrowing down the location of top players in the military wing, and served as a major public relations victory in showing that Israel's main targets are the senior commanders overseeing Hamas' battles and rocket operation, rather than indiscriminate civilians.

The focus of Israel's operation in Gaza has moved beyond the mostly destroyed tunnels and waning rocket caches that the 45-day war has centered on so far: it is now the military commanders in charge of Hamas' activities that have returned to the lens of the Israeli defense establishment's periscope. Targeted assassinations have long been a part of Israel's modus operendi against terrorist entities, from Hamas to Hezbollah, and have resumed in full force following the collapse of the cease-fire talks in Cairo.

Deif's wife, infant son and teenaged daughter were killed in the attack on the home of Mohammed Yassin Dalou, the chief rocket commander in Gaza and member of an integral family of Hamas activists. The successful or failed attempt on Deif's own life, yet to be verified, was followed by two more thorough and proven assassinations the next night: the senior commander of the southern Gaza brigades, Mohammed Abu Shamaleh, and his Rafah brigadier, Raed al-Attar, integral elements in that region of the Strip, both heavily involved in the captures of Corp. Gilad Shalit in 2006 and of Liet. Hadar Goldin last month. These assassinations have severely weakened Gaza's southern command; though Hamas' military leaders are largely interchangeable, these were rocket and battle experts with lengthy experience and heavy authority over Rafah and the surrounding area. For the near future at least, Rafah under Hamas is unguided, and under uncertain command.

Israel was able to pinpoint both the location of the Deif family and that of the two southern brigadiers through huminet intelligence, its strongest yet in a war of limited Shin Bet sources, following three failed cease-fires and dead-end negotiations. Twenty-one collaborators are said to have been executed by Hamas following the assassinations, indications of the veracity of this cooperation and of others yet to emerge.

Hamas insists that Deif was unharmed in the attack on the Dalou home, declaring the day after his alleged assassination that he was alive and well and remained the commander who would lead the units to conquest of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Yet most analysts, and basic intelligence, estimate that Deif was killed in the attempt. Deif was already severely disabled by four prior attempts by Israel on his life, and served in the last few years as a figurehead alone, while the actual operations were overseen by acting chief Marwan Issa. Without video proof or at least an audio message from Deif, there can be no clear verification of his survival or demise.

Palestinian news agencies released a certificate of death containing two names immediately following the fatal attack on the Al-Sultan neighborhood in Gaza, where the Dalou family lives and the Deifs were staying: those of Deif's wife Widad, and their 7-month-old son Ali. A second certificate circulated by the Gazan agency Saham News hours later showed a near identical document, with another line inserted above, naming Mohammed Deif, born in 1965, as a third fatality in the attack. Both documents are suspect to forgery; no clear answer has yet emerged which was indeed doctored, or by whom.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas held a little-publicized, but very important meeting with Hamas' political chief Khaled Meshal on Thursday in Doha, alongside the chief Palestinian negotiator to the Cairo talks, Ahmed al Azzam, and the Qatari ruler Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.

At the end of these talks, Meshal plans to travel to Cairo with Abbas, for the first time since his visit to Gaza two years ago, as a persona very non grata in Egypt. The decision whether Egypt will allow his entry depends on the outcome of Thursday night's discussions: he will likely only be invited into Cairo if the talks with the Palestinian Authority delegation yields results for a future arrangement and if his purpose in Cairo is to close such a deal.

Deif, by most intelligence and basic scenarios, did not manage to reach his ninth cat life, nor even a fifth miraculous survival of Israeli assassination attempts. He has already achieved godlike status in Gaza, despite holding only a nominal commander status since his last devastating injury by Israel in 2006.

Israel's assassination policies, harsh and lethal and of inevitable costs, have been questioned numerous times as to whether they are effective or a waste of energy and life. With Meshal now begging to return to Cairo, no sign of truce ahead and a severe Israeli intelligence dart on the heads of Gaza's military commanders, this policy seems ever more effective – not marked just by those who are killed, but by who is targeted and at what proximity.

Mohammed Deif, a skeleton of a human from four assassination attempts, is not only a figurehead commander to Hamas: he is a figurehead in Israel's targeted attempts as well. He has died four times before, one more, even final, will hardly make a difference. The tie has been broken by proof of Israel's intelligence in Gaza as the war enters its 46th day without sign of relent. Hamas has just a few thousand rockets remaining, but wants a war of attrition, willing to fight to the last explosive. Israel can now accede, knowing the attrition is on its side. Its army is strong and its intelligence in a formerly off-limits territory is tight, capable of weakening Hamas. The arm wrestle is on. One side must give. Hamas, always first to throw the shots, is already buckling. The only victory now will be back on the diplomatic battlefields of Cairo.

Rejection of this final truce would be a suicide pact for Israel and Hamas

Israelis and Gazans awoke Monday morning to an unsettling and familiar silence – quiet on both fronts as their governments agreed to a new 72-hour truce aimed at reaching a permanent cease-fire and a security arrangement for the Gaza Strip, one that will inevitably ease Hamas' iron hold over the coastal territory.

Both sides are well versed in what these heretofore redundant lulls mean: hourly countdowns as the truce holds - awaiting one false move - and come midnight on day three, the very real chance that the negotiations will prove fruitless and the fighting will resume. If this round of talks fails, the trade of fire will be harsher than before, and the consequences will be all the more devastating: Nothing will stop Hamas from launching the thousands of rockets and mortar shells still in its cache at rapid rate until they run out; Israel will make good on its promise to respond with relentless force, and a full-out invasion of the Gaza Strip will likely be its next desperate battle move.

This is the last chance for both Israel and Hamas. One more failed truce and the Egyptian mediators will have no further recourse to negotiate a future arrangement. Rejection of this draft, which awards unprecedented concessions to Hamas with guarantees for Israel's security, would be a suicidal move for both, setting the region back at least 10 years and ensuring an indefinite state of war with innumerable casualties and losses on either side.

Hamas has won Cairo's assurances that most of its demands will be met: Israel will halt fire, border crossings will open under Palestinian Authority and Egyptian supervision, Gaza will be rehabilitated through billions of dollars provided by international and inter-Arab forces (to be discussed in the next stage of talks), its fishing zone will be extended significantly, more monthly permits will be granted to allow Gaza residents to pass through Israel into the West Bank, and a prisoner release plan will be set with Israel at later stages of negotiations.

Israel has refused to relent on the opening of air and sea ports in the Gaza Strip. but has eased its firm demand for the demilitarization of Gaza, expressing willingness in internal deliberations to settle on assurances that the militant groups will not be rearmed. Hamas' main demand – that the blockade on Gaza be lifted – can only be achieved through this Egyptian draft, which enables the opening of land crossings via external monitoring and within guidelines amenable to Israel's security concerns. Even without direct sea and air access, Gaza will no longer be cut off from the world and if the transfer of goods and people across the land crossing is respected, may well see establishment of these ports in the not so distant future.

Israel, which refused to send its own delegation back to Cairo until the Palestinian factions agreed to the temporary truce, did not resume its end of the negotiations blindly. The team was in direct contact with Egyptian and international officials throughout, well-updated on the arrangements being made to simultaneously enable these gestures to Hamas without sacrificing Israel's own conditions for a future security agreement.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE were enlisted to fund the rehabilitation of Gaza, in addition to Hamas' main benefactor Qatar, to ensure that any flow of money and material through the soon-to-be-eased borders is not used for terror or military means. Millions of dollars were transferred to Hamas' leadership in the hours before the Islamist organization officially agreed to the temporary truce, to pay the salaries of its military men and government clerks – a factor that no doubt sweetened its resolve to agree to the cease-fire.

The Israeli delegation returned to Cairo before noon on Monday, after nearly 12 hours of quiet. The negotiations over the next two days will be tense and technical, as the mediators attempt to tune their draft to exactly the pitch both the Israeli and Palestinian sides want to hear. Back at home, Israelis and Gazans will just as tensely await the verdict: Will the cease-fire be extended? Will the blockade be lifted? Or will war resume again?

If this round of negotiations and the temporary truce holding it upright falter, there will be no chance for revival. Hamas will remain isolated, without avenue of repair for the destruction in the Gaza Strip or support for the thousands of residents orphaned, displaced and disabled by the war. It will fire its waning arsenal at Israel at rapid rate and find itself under full occupation again, with no end to the blockade in sight. Israel will be left to deal with the welfare of 3 million people and the rise of even more hostile jihadist militancy. The Egyptian outline must still be fine-tuned, but even in its unfinished draft, offers a win-win solution for both Israel and Hamas. It is the final frontier for any semblance of peace and security in this region and the only mechanism left to prevent a reoccupation of the Gaza Strip.

The Gaza-Israel war isn't over yet

Israel withdrew all of its forces from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday morning, at the exact moment that the 72-hour Egyptian-brokered truce was scheduled to begin and just as Hamas finished firing its last punctuating barrage of rockets, at the second the clock ticked 8 A.M. The cease-fire has held for nearly 48 hours now, but the war is not quite over, and this never-ending conflict between neighbors in such close quarters is even further from being resolved.

Both Hamas and Israel want this fragile truce, hinging on the current talks in Cairo, to extend beyond the Friday morning deadline – neither is prepared to return to war at this moment, but rifts are clear in the negotiations. Aside from the demands posed by Hamas, toward which both Israel and the external mediators are willing to show flexibility, there is one post-truce outcome that Israel is not prepared to abandon and that Hamas refuses to accept: demilitarization.

Hamas and the Palestinian factions of Gaza knelt this week in unconditional surrender to the Egyptian cease-fire draft, stipulating a 3-day lull in fighting before resumption of negotiations on any future agreements. It was the same exact same offer they rejected three weeks ago, before Israel embarked on its ground operation, and that they nixed once again last Friday after accepting and then rescinding with attacks on Israeli forces 90 minutes into that truce. They finally realized that there is no alternative to this offer they could not refuse and had refused twice already. Israel, which declared unilateral withdrawal and boycotted the Cairo truce talks earlier this week, emerged the strategic victor: the outline it drafted with Egypt at the beginning of the war is nearly one in the same as that which Hamas agreed to, the failed interventions of Qatar, Turkey and the U.S. in the last weeks filed and forgotten.

Hamas presented a 10-point list of demands in Qatar last month, as that aspiring political power attempted to mediate, including inter alia a withdrawal of Israeli forces, a cessation of operation on the tunnels, the opening of border crossings, the establishment of sea and air ports, a 6-12 nautical mile fishing zone, a lifting of the blockade, and the release of prisoners. Save the first two demands – which Israel carried out unilaterally – the subsequent clauses were omitted from the Egyptian outline, which in its presentation to Hamas is nearly identical to its initial form. Each of the following demands is still up for negotiation, and proposals on how to meet them in a way amenable to Israel and the international community are under discussion.

Israel has already begun to repair the border fence with Gaza and has lifted both the roadblocks in southern communities and the Home Front guidelines on safety during wartime, calling on citizens to resume routine; residents are free to return home, though most are reticent, filled still with the fear of a monster emerging from a tunnel under their children's beds, a real and concrete threat while the tunnels remained unmonitored.

In Gaza, the devastation is extreme. Nearly 1880 people have been killed, almost 10,000 wounded, and a quarter of the population has been displaced. The damage is estimated at some $5 billion. Aid has already begun flowing in: international entities from the UN to member countries, including Italy, U.S., Turkey, and the International Red Cross have sent tons of assistance; Israeli electric teams are working to repair the destroyed power lines and hundreds of truckloads of aid have passed through the Israeli border to Gaza. This rehabilitation will take years to conclude.

A generation of Palestinians in Gaza will not forget this war. Like their neighbors on the Israeli side, there is no guarantee that a monster will not attack in the middle of the night. Their parents have been killed, they have been dismembered, and their homes have been destroyed. A generation of Israelis is filled with the same hatred, not just toward Gazans, but toward all Arabs and Palestinians: these are their monsters, not innocent children, nor women, nor civilians; monsters that must be destroyed. The hatred the world hoped had been eradicated in the 10 years since the second intifada is stronger than ever.

Israel's hidden agenda, unsaid amid the very real rhetoric of destroying tunnels and halting rocket attacks, was to imbue in Gazans the realization that Hamas was a political force capable only of devastation and self-destruction, and thus lead to a democratic choice to let the Palestinian Authority resume control of the territory.

"Israel is hoping that external pressure from the outside might be combined with the internal pressure of people from Gaza when they realize the devastation [the Hamas leadership causes]," a former Israeli security official told me. "They might resist or at least complain, and these two pressures might bring a regime change, political change that might guarantee no more attacks [against Israel]."

This hope is optimistic at best and catastrophically self-defeating at worse. Hamas' popularity, as a resistance army capable of standing its own against one of the great militaries in the world for nearly a month, is higher than it was before the war. Even if the PA assumes control of the border crossings, and even if the unity agreement is reworded with Hamas to enable a democratic realization of this security situation, most Gazans do not see Hamas as the enemy Israel had hoped they would – they are disillusioned by war, and eager to live in peace and quiet, but they do not embrace Israel's rhetoric of Hamas as their primary monster.

If this cease-fire indeed manages to hold for the three days stipulated and beyond, it will be very difficult for Hamas to return to war. Israel has publicly disengaged, on alert in the area, but not in war mode. Hamas has lost nearly 2/3 of its arsenal and its tunnel operations are under tight Israeli surveillance.

The first two days of cease-fire have left Israelis and Gazans alike unsettled: there is no guarantee that the other side won't attack or that this respite is anything more than just biding time until the next war. For many Israelis, the disappointment stems from a sentiment that the goal of wiping out Hamas' capabilities has not been achieved. Infiltrations and rocket attacks are still possible: Gaza militants have 3,000 rockets and 10,000 mortar shells and Israeli intelligence on the tunnels is better than ever, but still limited. The army announced that its operation on the tunnels had ended after 32 were located and destroyed – but it is well aware that more exist beyond their intelligence.
For both Israelis in the south and Gazans, the basic activities of sleep, shopping, and going about daily life still just a cautious dream; for Gazans, the world as they knew it is devastated beyond belief.

A third intifada will emerge quicker than its predecessors unless the negotiations in Egypt following this quick truce stamp it down. Gazans, mainstream Israelis, and West Bank Palestinians are war-worn and hateful of their enemies. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose calculated decisions over the last month have won him enormous ratings in Israel, must take this final and waning opportunity to negotiate a settlement with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the caretaker of not only the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but now also the Gaza Strip, as its unity agreement with Hamas unfolds in the most concrete terms amid the Islamist leadership's loss of functional control over its territory.

The stakes are higher than ever. The future of both Palestinian and Israeli security now rest in the hands of Egypt, which has sidestepped the U.S. as the strongest mediatory force in the region; months of negotiations, rehabilitation, and security arrangements are still ahead. Anyone quick enough to say this war is over will find themselves just as quickly back in battlefield again.

Hamas can't lose this war, because it has nothing to lose

Ninety minutes into a 72-hour humanitarian truce facilitated by Egypt and reluctantly agreed to by Hamas, the calm was shattered and the fighting resumed. Palestinian militants opened fire on Israeli forces in south Gaza, prompting an artillery response from the Israel Defense Forces; rockets were fired at southern Israel and fierce battles ensued in the Strip. The fighting continued to escalate over the course of the morning and afternoon, with at least 90 Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers killed, a third said kidnapped by Hamas; the temporary truce, the longest scheduled lull to date in this operation, was halted in its infancy and forgotten - back to the battlefield and back to the drawing board.

By agreeing to the lengthy truce, Hamas in effect surrendered – to Israel's military pressure, to the superiority of the Palestinian Authority pushing it into negotiations, and to the Egyptian mediators drafting the terms of the proposal. It is not known whether the breach of truce on Friday morning was carried out by Hamas local militants at their own discretion or upon orders of the top echelon. The latter is unlikely, but regardless of which militants attacked and on what level, it is Hamas' political leadership that ultimately answers to and accepts responsibility for every military action, as the rulers of the Gaza Strip.

Egypt told the Palestinians this week, following the snub of its exclusion from U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's intervention, that they would not be invited back to Cairo for further negotiations until a temporary cease-fire had been set in place. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met with Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal on Thursday in a furious bid to convince him to agree to Egypt's terms and to a temporary lull, as the only way to set into motion negotiations for an actual end to the war. Hamas is a serious organization with a calculated political echelon. Meshal's word to abide by the truce was solid, indicating the Hamas political echelon's readiness to take the next step and move toward a permanent agreement.

The 72-hour truce was intended to give the sides the necessary time to hash out the details of Egypt's revised draft – one that included numerous changes acquiescing to Hamas' demands, particularly freedom of movement through Gaza's southern border crossing. With calm on the battle front, an amenable agreement could be determined and the real negotiations – on the future security arrangements in Gaza and on its borders – could begin. Following the breach of truce, Egypt informed Israel and the Palestinians that its delegations were no longer expected in Cairo on Friday, its conditions firm and unchanged: No negotiations until a temporary cease-fire is in place.

The Hamas leadership is divided into three hierarchical but highly coordinated governing bodies: the Majlis al-Shura, a religious council nominally in charge of the movement's strategic decisions and supervision of its activities; followed by the political bureau, run by Khaled Meshal from Qatar and Ismail Haniyeh, his chief deputy in Gaza; and the subordinate Iz A-din Qassam Brigades, the movement's military wing.

Hierarchy aside, the three bodies' decisions are made in tandem with one another. The military wing is not a renegade branch free to act of its accord. Every decision on the military front must be made with the knowledge and blessing of the political wing and the ruling council. There are cracks in communication, however, and not all orders are carried out; a likely explanation of the initial breach of truce on Friday morning: This is particularly true among the rank-and-file of Hamas' military command, where there is a growing sense of distance and abandonment from the political leadership. If it was Hamas that breached the truce on Friday – and not members of a separate Palestinian faction – it was a decision made within the mid-level military command, either by militants in the trenches unaware that a cease-fire had been declared or by those acting in defiance of political order. Regardless of why and how the breach of truce emerged, however, Hamas has in its wake withdrawn from its agreement and returned to battle mode.

Hamas opened this war three weeks ago because it had nothing to lose: it knew that firing rockets on Israel would draw fierce aerial attacks and likely lead to a ground invasion, along with a serious death toll among its civilian population; it knew that its long-range rocket supply would be wiped out by rapid fire and Israeli strikes, and it knew that even if it won back its former allies Hezbollah and Iran, there was no way they could help replenish its arsenal or that arms would flow again into its tightly secured borders.

Hamas also knew that it had surprise weaponry and strategies capable of inflicting more harm than either Israel or the world could have anticipated. Through its labyrinth of tunnels it managed to store hundreds of mid-range and dozens of long-range rockets (far beyond Israeli intelligence estimates), and beyond that, its greatest weapon of all: the ability to infiltrate Israel and launch its own ground incursion on enemy territory.

Hamas militants have managed to enter Israel through these tunnels at least five times in three weeks, a number of ambushes into Israeli territory unseen since the war in 1948. A 3 km security zone has been demarcated along the border inside Gaza, but no such buffer is in place inside Israel – civilians and soldiers sit meters from the border, on top of the tunnel openings. Israeli forces have located and destroyed dozens of the tunnels inside Gaza, but many remain hidden, including the openings into Israeli territory. The infiltrations can and will continue until either a cease-fire is secured or Israel is forced to evacuate its border towns and create a security strip of significant radius – a complicated and strategically difficult endeavor.

In battle terms, Israel has already won this war: 63 soldiers killed and three civilians, compared to more than 1,450 Palestinian fatalities, among them 400-500 combatant according to IDF estimates, and unimaginable destruction of Gaza's cities and villages. Hamas' leaders have already bent to political pressure, prepared to negotiate, but are of the same mind as their militants and those of the other Palestinian factions – no surrender and no end except on their own terms. Hamas can't lose this war, because they have nothing to lose. Its militants are prepared to fight until Israel, military power or not, cries uncle – or until the powers negotiating a permanent agreement relent, and include its terms in their entirety, an unlikely scenario at this point. Gaza may be demilitarized in the end, as Israel and Egypt hope, but it may well be through Hamas' own self-destruction, in months and countless deaths ahead. Without a quick and immediate cease-fire, this war will continue indefinitely.

The UNHRC farce must not undermine an Israel-Gaza truce

Of all the United Nations agencies, the most obscure and self-defeating is the Human Rights Council. There are many organizations and bodies under UN auspices, some of them important for world peace – such as the Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – and those whose mandate is to clean the world of hunger and human injustices – the World Health Organization, the International Children's Fund, the Food and Agricultural Organization, the Refugee Agency and the Relief and Works Agency, tailor-made to deal with Palestinian refugees.

Each of these contributes to the betterment of humanity. The only UN body with the word human in its name, the UNHRC, is the most detached from humanity.

The UNHRC in Geneva returned last week to its favorite topic, one which it has focused on intensively from its very first session in 2006: Israeli crimes against humanity. To call it anti-Israel is an understatement, and one need not be pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian to deduce such from its track record.

In the 21 sessions since its inception in 2006 as the successor to the heavily criticized Commission on Human Rights, the UNHRC has released seven resolutions calling for investigation of Israeli human rights violations – one-third of its efforts. Four resolutions have been opened in that time against Syria (170,000 dead), two on Darfur (300,000 killed), and one on Libya (25,000 fatalities at the height of its 2011 civil war) – each of these countries guilty of extreme crimes against humanity. None of these resolutions or commissions of inquiry have yielded results other than deploring certain actions and a declaration of intent to investigate. None too, will its latest resolution on Israel.

The UNHRC's resolution on July 23 called for an urgent commission of inquiry into Israel's war crimes in the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem. It expressed "grave concern" over the lack of implementation from its previous commission charged with investigating human rights violations, led by Richard Goldstone, following the 2009 Gaza war, "convinced that lack of accountability for violations of international law reinforces a culture of impunity, leading to a recurrence of violations and seriously endangering the maintenance of international peace."

In the five pages of its latest resolution, Israel was noted 18 times – once calling for an end of attacks against civilians, including Israeli, and the rest deploring Israeli military aggressions, the incitement of extremist and illegal Israeli settlers, Israeli occupation, Israeli arrests of Palestinians, and Israeli failures to protect Palestinian civilians in accordance with international law. All important, all ignorant of the other side's own activities.

Hamas was not mentioned even once, not even in the brief clause demanding attention to the attacks against Israeli civilians. There was no clause recommending investigation into the Gazan government's use of civilian buildings as cover for its illegal tunnels housing weapons depots and launchers, nor into the widespread reports of its urging residents to ignore Israeli military warnings to evacuate – the word 'human shield' has never once been used in eight years of resolutions.

Twenty-nine of 46 member states voted in favor of the UNHRC's latest resolution, including India, in what has been seen as a major policy shift, as part of its alliance with the BRIC countries. Only the United States voted against the resolution; 17 countries abstained – all European. Their abstention, as the major voting bloc in the council, was tantamount to approval; in the UNHRC there is an automatic majority against Israel.

The resolution, as in most of the UN bodies – including the General Assembly and the Security Council - is not binding. It is a recommendation alone, one that reflects the "resolve" of a particular body, enforcing the views of its member states. There is little chance of legal intervention and unless the International Criminal Court or member states of the UNHRC choose to adopt the body's decision as legally binding nationally, the resolution will have no official impact on Israeli actions, nor can it threaten its legal status in international law.

What this resolution does, in effect, is isolate Israel as a violator of human rights, regardless of circumstance. In expressing its concern over the "lack of findings" in Goldstone's 2009 report, it neglects to mention that Goldstone himself retracted his findings of Israeli guilt of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity [an investigation which Israel refused to cooperate with]: "While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the UN committee's report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy," Goldstone said in his retraction.

Goldstone, who also served as chief prosecutor in the international tribunals of Yugoslavia and Rwanda following those genocides, criticized the UNHRC at the time of his retraction as a body that "repeatedly rush[es] to pass condemnatory resolutions in the face of alleged violations of human rights law by Israel but ... have failed to take similar action in the face of even more serious violations by other States. Until the Gaza Report they failed to condemn the firing of rockets and mortars at Israeli civilian centers."

The pattern is clear. The United Nations Human Rights Council has no bearing on international law, only on opinion. International efforts to determine crimes against humanity must not be left to an obscure council to determine – particularly not one in which nearly half of its members abstain in vote. There are tribunals for these prosecutions, obliged by international law to take into context the full picture – in this case, not just Israeli violations, but those of Hamas too. Any tribunal that fails to mention the crimes of Gaza's rulers has failed in its task of adhering to international law, regardless of its findings on Israeli actions.

The United Nations Human Rights Council should focus its efforts on the massacres still happening in Syria and in Iraq's Mosul region – where militias unbound by international law are at relentless and unsupervised war.

The conflict between Israel and Hamas – the latter which wishes to be seen as a viable regime with nearly three million people under its authority, with little military and political support – must first be concluded in a cease-fire between the two governments and then in a political agreement involving either the Palestinian Authority or an international supervising force, to ensure a long-standing cease-fire. Declarations of crimes against humanity on the part of Israel are premature, preconceived, and ignorant of the facts on the ground.