No Winners

The BBC reports that Hamas announces ceasefire in Gaza.

Hamas’ deputy chief in Syria, Moussa Abou Marzouk, said the ceasefire was in the name of all “Palestinian resistance factions”.

“We… announce a ceasefire of our factions in the Gaza Strip and we stress that our demand is the withdrawal of the enemy forces from the Gaza Strip within a week, along with the opening of all the crossings for the entry of humanitarian aid, food and other necessities for our people in the Gaza Strip.”

The group said the ceasefire would be temporary unless Israel met these long-standing demands.

These are exactly the same demands that Hamas has made since it came to power.

Ynet has a report on a recent US-Israeli absurdity

In front of an array of reporters and camera crews, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and visiting Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni signed the “memorandum of understanding” at the State Department.

This deals with smuggling arms into Gaza. I was surprised to learn that the US was still smuggling arms. I thought that stopped after the Fatah forces the US supported in Gaza were routed by Hamas. Unless the US is involved in the actual arms smuggling, this photo op makes no sense at all.

AFP reports that Egypt is not part of deal:

Mubarak insisted that Egypt was securing its border with the Gaza Strip, and Egypt’s Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit said his country would not be bound by a just-inked US-Israeli deal to stop arms smuggling to Gaza.

Egypt has a large problem trying to secure its border with Israel: according to the treaty between Egypt and Israel, only civilian police and members of the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) can deploy on the Egyptian side, so there are no regular border forces there, and no heavy weapons. The regular police are ill-equipped to deal with arms smugglers, and preventing smuggling is not part of the MFO’s mandate.

While Israel has done significant damage to the UN’s resources in Gaza, it doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact on Hamas.  The International Committee of the Red Cross and the health care infrastructure of Gaza have been have been severely wounded by Israeli shells and bombs.  Over a thousand people are dead and thousands more wounded, but Hamas is still able to lob rockets into Israel.

To put things into perspective, twice as many Israelis die every month in traffic accidents as have died in all of the rocket attacks since 2001.  Wouldn’t it make more sense to spend the money on traffic law enforcement than blowing up schools in Gaza, if you are trying to save Israeli lives?