Ceasing Hostilities, Temporarily

"One way in which an Israeli military operation could backfire is by shaking Hamas's control on the ground to the point that it allowed other factions, including jihadists, to come to the fore."
"At least Hamas provides an address -- you don't have that with the jihadi factions. They aren't dominant right now, but Hamas no longer controls Gaza as firmly as it used to, and if it was seriously weakened they could take advantage. We don't want another Somalia on our doorsteps."
"A conquest of Gaza ... could also result in the collapse of Hamas rule and total chaos ... an even worse prospect."
Brig.-Gen. Michael Herzog, former chief of staff, Ministry of Defence, Israel

"Egypt would likely demand Hamas really put an end to the rocket fire and attacks on Israel, end its relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, cut all contacts with the jihadist groups acting in Sinai and even help in the fight against these elements."
Eli Shaked, former Israeli ambassador in Cairo

"They still have a huge military structure. They are not going away."
"I believe the Hamas military would just finish those people off [any terror group challenging Hamas for primacy]. The moment they feel a danger to themselves they will kill them."
Yigal Carmon, former chief counter terrorism adviser; president and founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute

Israeli army flares falling into Gaza. Photograph: JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images

Hamas has seen hard times. Granted, it was feeling its proverbial oats with the conclusion of the 2012 IDF incursion into Gaza, basking in congratulations from Turkey and Qatar, and graciously accepting millions from the latter to help it restore its cache of rockets during that brief period of combat with Israeli forces. Since then, superior, more advanced rocketry has been stored in their weapons depots, depots buried all over Gaza, installed as well within mosques, hospitals, apartment buildings, hotels to keep them within handy use when needed.

Israeli flares float down over Gaza in Sderot, Israel. Photograph: Andrew Burton/Getty Images

They were deemed to be needed over the past week, in furious protest over the IDF's orders to retake many of the Hamas prisoners that were released to secure the freedom of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit as Israel rounded up the terrorist members as they scoured the West Bank for the killers of three abducted Israeli Jewish teens. Not that barrages of rockets weren't routinely lobbed from Gaza into Israel anyway; the pace just picked up notably provoking the Israeli aerial bombardment.

With almost a thousand rockets fired into Israel, some fairly long-ranging and threatening, along with several intercepted drones, Hamas was still left with thousands of rockets in their arsenal. Events have moved with swift passage in the Middle East and North Africa since then; Libya is still in the throes of tribal and jihadi disturbances, Egypt rejected its first democratically elected Islamist government to return to quasi-military rule and Syria and Iraq have collapsed under the weight of bitterly lethal sectarian atrocities.

Hamas has lost its sponsors, both the Muslim Brotherhood and in large part, Iran. It is bankrupt. It cannot pay its 50,000 civil servants and Fatah with whom it just recently signed a unity government agreement, refused to fund the Hamas payroll. Gazans have been edgy under the firm Islamist rule of Hamas, and unhappier still at the blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt, hampering any notion of free movement between borders as long as Gaza is administered by a terrorist group committed to the destruction of Israel, and helping Salafist and al-Qaeda linked Sinai groups terrorizing Egypt.

An Israeli mobile artillery unit fires towards Gaza from outside the Gaza Strip. Photograph: Nir Elias/Reuters

While Iran is distracted in its aid to the Syrian regime and dispatching its al-Quds Republic Guard militia to help the Iraqi government protect Baghdad from the incursion of the Islamic State of Iraq & Al-Sham, which has carved out its Caliphate in what was quite recently parts of Syria and Iraq, little funding is coming through to help Hamas. Hamas thought it could turn its fortunes around by a limited war which would bring it plaudits from the wider Arab world and with the admiration, cash donations.

That doesn't appear to have happened, and the Rafah crossing into Egypt has also remained blockaded. Israel's targeting of commanders within Hamas and with Palestinian Islamic Jihad had limited success; while the commanders urge their underlings to regard martyrdom as the highest honour to which they can ascend for Allah, they appear themselves reluctant to surrender their own lives quite so readily and have concealed themselves deep underground, brave souls. While at the same time urging Gazans not to flee when warned by the IDF of imminent aerial strikes, but to stand fast and defy the 'Zionist entity'.

Should Hamas be entirely destroyed by Israel, Israel could contemplate the vacuum would speedily be filled by Islamist groups more intractably ferocious in their hatred for Israel than Hamas. Militias like the Popular Resistance Committee, the Al-Nasser Salah Al-Deen Brigades, the Salafist Tawhid & Jihad and Ansar Al Sunnah who consider their appetite for Israel's destruction more dedicated and faithful to the tenets of Islamic conquest than Hamas's.

Marxist groups like the PFLP operate in Gaza, and should Hamas be destroyed they would simply filter in in greater numbers, along with the Islamic State terrorists. The PFLP called for "resistance factions to escalate strikes in each area, including rockets and missiles, to compel the occupying entity to pay a price for its aggression". Hamas, in fact, dispersed a rally in celebration of ISIS victories in Syria and Iraq, within Gaza. Egyptian security forces arrested 15 ISIS terrorists attempting entry into Egypt's Sinai peninsula from Gaza.

The Egyptian-brokered ceasefire proposal may bring the hostilities to a halt while the death toll of Palestinians within Gaza hovers under 200. Hamas's demand that all its Hamas members that Israel has re-introduced to their prison cells be released will not be met. But Egypt will most certainly be sympathetic to Israel's demands that all of Hamas's rocket caches be dismantled and destroyed, since they are almost as much a threat to Egypt as they are to Israel. Its conditions met, Israel is prepared to accept another ceasefire, while Hamas cavils, perhaps unsettled that it has gained nothing of any value to its prolonged status as the single administrative power in Gaza.