Despite the use of overwhelming military power to kill more than 800 Palestinians, a third of them children, and to inflict more than 3,000 casualties, and despite the shelling of a UN school and the house in Zeitoun containing 100 Palestinian evacuees as well as other atrocities, Israel rather than Hamas is now caught in a trap it cannot escape. Fifteen days of relentless pounding have not broken either the will of Hamas to resist or the firing of rockets. Israel is now confronted by a dilemma they have hitherto been loth to face up to.

Either now Israeli forces must re-occupy the main cities in Gaza with all the house-to-house fighting and heavy loss of soldiers’ lives that this would entail (which hitherto they have been deeply reluctant to do), or they must accept an early ceasefire and try to secure terms more favourable than the French-Egyptian proposals. The former risks a casualty rate that could turn Israeli public opinion against the war and seriously undermine the prospects of the Livni-Barak parties in the 10 February election (which is what this war is about to a much greater degree than has been admitted). The latter risks allowing Hamas, like Hizbollah in Lebanon in 2006, to claim victory since it has survivived the full weight of the Israeli onslaught intact.
It is likely that the Israeli command will opt for the former, for fear that the latter could be militarily and politically even worse for them. How far such a concentrated assault gets will depend partly on what crescendo of international protest is reached (though Israel will probably ignore that, unless Obama makes clear he is strongly opposed) and partly on the level of Israeli casualties that Hamas can inflict.
The role of Britain at this juncture should be much more than simply pressing for a ceasefire, however essential that is as the first objective. The Lib Dems are right to call for a halt to Britain’s arms exports to Israel and to try to get that ban extended throughout the EU, as well as to demand that the proposed new EU cooperation agreement with Israel should be suspended until Israeli policy radically changes towards Gaza, which must include lifting the economic blockade and opening the crossings. Britain should also be indicating support for the Obama team’s tentative support for opening contacts with Hamas, even if secretly at first.
Above all, Britain should be pressing for a settlement that goes well beyond meeting the immediate demands that each side is making as conditions for the cessation of hostilities. If a ceasefire is fashioned without links to a wider process that addresses the fundamentals behind the conflict – the withdrawal of Israel to its pre-1967 borders, the creation of a viable Palestinian State, and a comprehensive peace treaty between the Arab States and Israel – it will last only temporarily. With the new US Administration clearly intending a break with the destructive and counter-productive partisanship of the Bush years, there is just a chance that the blood-letting in Gaza might offer the moment when a wider Middle East peace deal could be launched wsith a real hope of break-through.

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