Word: gaza
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Israel's election and the Gaza conflict have revealed the scale of the challenge facing U.S. President Barack Obama in jump-starting Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. Israeli voters tacked to the right, and the government that results from Tuesday's election will be, if anything, even less inclined than the current government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to conclude a two-state peace agreement with the Palestinian leadership. (Of course, the year of talks about talks between Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas failed to yield any progress.) Meanwhile, the Gaza war cemented the stature of Hamas...
...perilous decline in the coming months. Many members of Abbas' Fatah movement, seeing themselves steadily eclipsed by Hamas, are urging a break from their President's strategy of negotiating with the Israelis and a return to confronting the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. (See pictures of Gaza digging...
...talks with the Israelis. Palestinians could not get what they needed from Olmert, and they know that his successors will take even more of a hard line. From the Palestinian perspective, the past eight years of waiting for negotiations with Israel have left Abbas empty-handed, while the latest Gaza conflict has put Hamas in a stronger position than ever in the court of Palestinian public opinion. Despite the violence by Hamas gunmen against Fatah activists in Gaza since the Israeli offensive, many in Fatah view their movement's only hope of re-establishing a leading role in Palestinian politics...
...Gaza bloodbath prompted Obama to dispatch former Senator George Mitchell on a listening tour, to signal the new Administration's intent to prioritize peacemaking efforts. But the events of the past six weeks have confirmed that the Israeli-Palestinian peace policy bequeathed by the Bush Administration is dead in the water. If the new Administration is to make good on its promise of progress toward a two-state peace agreement, it will need the sort of thorough policy review currently being undertaken on its Iran policy - and a fresh set of ideas...
...independent Palestinian polling organization found last week that for the first time, Hamas has greater political support than Fatah across the West Bank and Gaza and would win any election that were held right now. Aides to Abbas are reportedly concerned that an Israel-Hamas deal to secure the release of the captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in Gaza could involve releasing the Hamas parliamentarians in Israeli detention. The Palestinian legislature is unable to meet because Israel holds those lawmakers. If it were able to convene, Hamas would remain the majority party...