Word: border
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...Hamas leaders say they're ready for a cease-fire, but only if it includes the opening of the border crossings whose closure has kept Gaza in an economic chokehold. That's something neither the Israelis, nor Hamas' Arab and Palestinian enemies, have been keen to allow. The pounding being suffered by Gaza may force the issue, however. One option diplomats may seek would be to have the crossings be controlled by a neutral force. So, the closing days - however long they extend - of the Israeli campaign are principally about shaping the terms of a truce...
...Sarkozy is expected to press Assad to help find an end to the Gaza bloodshed - notably by pressuring Hamas to fulfill Israeli demands that it stop firing rockets. Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Meshal seems willing to accept that condition in exchange for Israel's reopening border crossings that have economically asphyxiated Gaza - an issue that could eventually force a change in Egypt's closure of its frontier...
...that his present silence will cost him friends across the Middle East. The Gaza attack has strengthened Arab radicals while silencing the voices of moderate states once willing to improve ties with Israel. Egypt is in an especially tight spot: having brokered the old cease-fire and sealed its border with Gaza to lock in Hamas, the Egyptian government of President Hosni Mubarak is now being accused - by his own people and the larger Arab world - of looking the other way while Gaza burns. (Mubarak has responded by allowing some of Gaza's wounded to be brought to Egypt...
...wall at Rafah, allowing Palestinians to pour into Egypt to buy up basic supplies. Embarrassed and facing domestic and Arab pressure, President Hosni Mubarak left the breach open for the best part of a week before sealing it and renewing Egypt's insistence that it would open the border crossing only to Abbas' men. Now, in the midst of a new political firestorm created by the impression of Egyptian complicity in Israel's onslaught, pressure on Cairo is once again mounting. Still, Mubarak reiterated on Tuesday that Rafah would be opened only when the Palestinian Authority is in charge...
...that either combatant will agree until it inflicts more damage on the other, even though, according to one senior Hamas official reached by TIME on the telephone from Gaza, the militants' terms could be fairly simple: "If Israel stops its raid on Gaza and lifts its closure of the border crossings, we'll go for a truce immediately." But such conciliatory sentiments are not shared by those Hamas military commanders who are on the warpath. Says Shibley Telhami, a Middle East scholar at the University of Maryland: "Hamas, given the scale of the losses, isn't going to turn...