April 4, 2007:
There are still about a dozen
Kassam rockets a week being fired from Gaza, into southern Israel. This,
despite a ceasefire that was to have halted the rocket attacks. The
Palestinians have too many factions to make a peace deal that will be fully
effective. The Palestinians expect the Israelis to accept this. The Arab League
has again demanded that Israel pull out of the Palestinian territories, using
the 1967 borders, and then the Arab League will help work out a final peace
deal. The Israelis don't trust the Arab League, or the Palestinians, to to what
they say they will do. Everyone, Arab and Israeli alike, has lost faith
in the Palestinians, who will, apparently, have to fight their civil war to a
finish, before meaningful peace talks can resume.
April 3, 2007: Western journalists and aid workers
have largely abandoned Gaza, because it's too dangerous. One Western reporter,
kidnapped three weeks ago, has not even been heard from, and his captors remain
a mystery. Aid workers are shot at and threatened. Despite all this, millions
of dollars worth of Western food and other aid enters Gaza each week.
April 2, 2007: Egypt is becoming alarmed at the
growing arms race in Gaza. Hamas is building a force of 10,000 armed men, and
Fatah is trying to match it. Hamas is also building a new Kassam rocket, with a
range of 16 kilometers, enabling it to reach the Israeli town of Ashkelon. The
Hamas plan is to launch an attack, in coordination with another Hizbollah
rocket barrage from the north. But the Israelis are preparing for this, and
intend to clean out Gaza and southern Lebanon the next time around.
April 1, 2007: Egypt is alarmed at the increased
rate of arms smuggling into Gaza. Not wanting to be accused of being
"pro-Israel," the Egyptians have never made a major effort to stop
the smuggling, but now they are discussing just such a move with Israel. The
negative publicity is seen as preferable to the flood of refugees into Egypt,
if Gaza blows up in civil war, and there's an Israeli invasion. Many of those Gaza
refugees would be militants, willing to attack Egyptians for
"betraying" the Palestinian cause. Egypt has seen the future, and
they don't like it.
March 31, 2007: Both Fatah and Hamas have
been recruiting, arming and training new gunmen. Apparently the current
ceasefire in Gaza is only seen as an opportunity to get ready for a new round
of fighting. This has upset Iran, which bankrolls and supports Hamas. Iran
believes that if Hamas wins the civil war, Fatah will join the rising chorus of
anti-Iranian sentiment in the Arab world. Iran wants to support the
Palestinians, but until the Palestinians can finish with their civil war, there
is no unified Palestinian government to deal with.
March 30, 2007: Terrorist groups affiliated
with Fatah and Hamas continue to attempt terror attacks inside Israel. They are
having no success. But to keep it that way, Israel has several thousand
counter-terror specialists in action. This includes running an informant
network in the West Bank, and frequent raids, to act on information from the
informers.