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.
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