This aerial and ground campaign by Israel has now laster for 18 days, during which Israel seems to have learned from its previous such conflicts. It has withstood pressure from all around to stop this campaign (and taken heart from the Bush administration’s unwillingness to criticize Israel for these actions), taking the campaign deep inside Gaza. There have been a huge number of civilian casualties in this campaign, but Israel is stone-walling all such pressures. Inside Israel, the realization that Hamas controls a territory from where it can keep on attacking Israel through rockets that are steadily increasing in range (and from where it can soon reach crucial parts of Israel) would be part of the calculations to try and stop Hamas. This is a risky effort, and will not win Israel too many friends (although if the campaign succeeds and Hamas is weakened, there will be a weakening of the push by Iran and Syria to take leadership of the anti-Israeli campaign; something that will make many of the Governments of many of the Islamic countries of the region happy).

Israel says it attacked more than 60 targets overnight in Gaza as its offensive against Hamas entered its 18th day. The air assault came as Israeli troops advanced in the southern and eastern suburbs of Gaza City. The Israeli military also announced another three-hour ceasefire, starting at 0900 local time (0700 GMT), to allow aid lorries into Gaza.
Meanwhile, reports suggest diplomatic efforts between Egypt and Hamas in Cairo are progressing. After meeting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Middle East Quartet envoy Tony Blair said the elements were in place for a ceasefire agreement. “I am hopeful we can put an agreement together but it’s going to have to be worked on very hard and it’s got to be credible,” he told journalists. Israel hopes the scale of its operation will greatly reduce the number of missiles fired from Gaza into southern Israel, while eroding support for Hamas.

There are no easy solutions to the problem. The people of Gaza voted Hamas into a leading position, and pretty soon Hamas had evicted Fatah militarily from the strip of land, and taken command of the small strip of land abandoned by Israel in 2005. Hamas sees a long term aim as the eviction of Israel from the region, and does not recognize its right to exist. Israel is hoping that it will be able to destroy the top leadership of Hamas and scare it enough that Hamas will stop firing rockets into Israel, and one does not know whether that can ever be achieved.

Hezbollah handed the bodies of two Israeli soldiers to the Red Cross on Wednesday to be exchanged for Lebanese prisoners held by Israel in a deal viewed as a triumph by the Lebanese Shi’ite guerrilla group. Many Israelis see it as a painful necessity, two years after the soldiers’ capture sparked a 34-day war with Hezbollah that killed about 1,200 people in Lebanon and 159 Israelis.

The fathers of the two Israelis soldiers spoke of their pain at watching the television pictures of their sons’ coffins. “It is not easy to see this, although there was not much surprise to it. But … confronting this reality was difficult, yes,” Shlomo Goldwasser told Israel radio. Zvi Regev said on Army Radio: “It was very moving when we saw it. We couldn’t watch too long. It was a terrible thing to see, really terrible. I was always optimistic, and I hoped all the time that I would meet Eldad and hug him.” Hezbollah’s Safa said Israel had later handed over via the ICRC the bodies of eight Hezbollah fighters slain in the 2006 war, and those of four Palestinians, including Dalal Mughrabi, a woman guerrilla who led a bloody 1978 raid on Israel.

These prisoner exchanges somehow give further belief to the terrorist groups that Israel is weak and will submit to more such exchanges; it has been proved in the past that these groups have taken the policy of kidnapping in order to get their own prisoners released.

Iranian- and Syrian-backed Shiite opposition gunmen seized control of several Beirut neighborhoods from Sunni foes loyal to the U.S.-backed government on Friday. In a sign of the collapse of the pro-government forces in the face of the onslaught by the Shiite Hezbollah and Amal groups in the Lebanese capital’s Muslim sector, the TV station of top Sunni politician Saad Hariri’s Future Movement went off the air and the offices of its affiliated al-Mustaqbal newspaper on the edge of the city was set afire by opposition gunmen, according to TV footage and Hezbollah.

The scenes were a grim reminder of Lebanon’s devastating 1975-90 civil war in which 150,000 were killed and parts of the city wrecked. Factions threw up roadblocks and checkpoints dividing Beirut into sectarian enclaves. “We entered Karakol Druse. There is no Jumblatt and no Hariri here,” a Shiite gunman told Associated Press Television News, referring to the top Sunni leader and his ally, Druse leader Walid Jumblatt. The military has sought to stay out of the feuding, fearing a repeat of its breakup in the long civil war that wracked this country — home to rival communities of Sunni and Shiite Muslims, various Christian sects and Druse.

The problem with this conflict is that there are so many influences that it is difficult to tamp things down, and things could swiftly go from bad to worse. Syria has never backed away from trying to project its influence in Lebanon, and has carried out clandestine bombings and killings of figures opposed to its influence in Lebanon, including the former Primer Minister who was killed in 2005.