It is now difficult to see how the Gaza war, as we have known it for the last two years, will not be ended soon. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has famously said, it will end “either the easy way or the hard way” but it will end.
This choice resides with the beleaguered and shell-shocked Hamas leadership, such of it as survives. The distinction is between escaping with their lives but militarily defeated, and in terms of political influence, torn out of Gaza root and branch, or being killed in hopeless combat in their tunnels in central Gaza city where they are constantly reminded of the presence of 60,000 battle-hardened Israeli counter-urban guerrilla soldiers overhead.
