Desertpeace

On 24 March the Israeli army shot and killed a Palestinian farmer working in a field inside the Gaza Strip. Youssef Abu Dhair, 55, was killed east of Khan Younis by soldiers erecting a watchtower in the area. Two days earlier Israeli troops killed a member of the resistance group Islamic Jihad, prompting the faction to threaten to retaliate if Israel did not halt its attacks.

The tahdia (calm) has been made possible thanks to intensive diplomatic efforts by Egypt. Egyptian officials have been meeting with representatives of the Gaza-based resistance factions, particularly Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, in a bid to convince them to observe a ceasefire with Israel. According to both Egyptian and Palestinian sources, Egypt and Hamas reached a “tacit understanding” under which Hamas would stop firing homemade rockets at Israeli settlements for a week in return for Israel halting any operations in Gaza for the same period of time. Earlier this month representatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad met with Egyptian officials in Arish where a general — unannounced — agreement was reported to have been reached on Egypt’s ceasefire proposals.

Egyptian officials hope that the current tahdia will evolve into a comprehensive ceasefire agreement that will include a gradual lifting of the year-long economic blockade on the Gaza Strip and the reopening of the Rafah border crossing. One Egyptian official said the arrangement might also include a possible exchange of prisoners.

The promise that the blockade will be lifted — a central demand of Hamas — appears to have been enough to convince the Palestinian Islamic movement to heed Egypt’s requests to call a halt to the cross-border firing of Qassam missiles. Conscious of the benefits of a long-lasting calm, Hamas appears to have been successful in convincing Islamic Jihad and other factions to refrain from firing their own projectiles “in the national interest”.

Meanwhile, Israel continued to give mixed signals as to its own position vis-à-vis the calm. There are reports that the Israeli army has noted “a certain change” in Hamas’s behaviour of late, with one unnamed military commander quoted as saying that Hamas was “refraining from supplying rockets to other Palestinian factions”. In addition, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, while denying any talks with Hamas, was quoted as saying that should rockets stop being fired from Gaza “there might be a new reality”.

Yet Israel refuses to view the de facto calm as an agreement, however indirect, with Hamas, and continues to insist Israel “only hitched a ride on an arrangement already reached between Hamas and Cairo”.

On Monday the Israeli newspaper Haaretz quoted senior military commanders as saying that the relative calm was likely to be temporary because “Egypt will have a hard time securing an overall agreement given the vast gap between the two sides.” Amos Gilad, the head of the Defence Ministry’s Political Department, who visited Cairo recently, denied any connection between his talks with Egyptian security officials and the understandings reached between Egypt and Hamas.

Hamas has praised Egyptian efforts to restore calm along the Israel-Gaza borders, saying that Cairo was reasserting its concern for the “wellbeing of our people”.

“We have responded positively to Egyptian efforts to stop the Israeli aggression against our people. We hope that the reopening of the Rafah border crossing will be a matter of time,” said Ahmed Youssef, political adviser to Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister of the Gaza-based Hamas-led government. Youssef told Al-Ahram Weekly that the key to consolidating and stabilising the de facto calm was in Israel’s hands, not Hamas’s.

“We hope that the Arab summit in Damascus will give its full support to the tahdia and also to the Sanaa Declaration,” said Youssef, referring to the Yemeni-brokered agreement between Fatah and Hamas earlier this week. “But a lasting calm depends on Israel since Palestinian resistance is only a reaction to Israeli aggression.”

The Sanaa Declaration, signed on 23 March, calls for the restoration of relations between Fatah and Hamas to their status before last year’s bloody clashes. It also urged direct talks between Fatah and Hamas with the purpose of “implementing the agreement” contained in the declaration.

It is a move that has divided Fatah leaders in the West Bank, with a senior aide to PA President Mahmoud Abbas accusing Fatah leader Azzam Al-Ahmed, who signed the agreement on behalf of Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), of “not consulting enough with President Abbas beforehand”.

In an apparently conciliatory move the Ma’an news agency, which is close to Fatah, reported on Wednesday that Abbas accepted the Sanaa Declaration in its entirety. If true this would end days of squabbling within Fatah over the acceptability of the agreement which several Fatah and PLO leaders view as being more favourable to Hamas. Earlier Haniyeh said that Hamas had agreed that the Sanaa Declaration could only serve as a basis for talks.

Observers in Palestine note that the tacit ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, however uneasy and fragile, along with the Yemeni-mediated deal with Fatah is likely to boost Hamas’s popularity and enable the movement to regain confidence.

On Tuesday former British prime minister Tony Blair called on the international community to rethink its strategy towards the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Blair, the envoy for the Quartet of Middle East Peace Negotiations, told a European panel in Brussels that “a different and better strategy” was needed for Gaza since the present strategy [of isolating Hamas] was not working.”

Some European parliamentarians also spoke against the policy of isolating Hamas. Josep Borrell, the Spanish former president of the European Parliament who now presides over the assembly’s development committee, was quoted as saying that, “the politics of isolating Hamas has not brought any benefits. You cannot make arrangements with just one part of the other side. Israel has to show it really believes in a viable Palestinian state because everything they [the Israelis] are doing suggests otherwise.”