Hamas Ends Israel Truce Early

The six-month truce between Hamas and Israel ended today with the militant Islamists who rule Gaza declaring the agreement dead, 24 hours before it was due to officially expire.

The declaration followed another day of escalating violence, beginning with an Israeli air raid on Gaza, which Hamas has controlled for the past 18 months.

Hamas responded to Israel's attack, which destroyed a weapons store and a rocket-making factory, by firing eight rockets and five mortars at Israel's southern towns.

"The calm, which was reached with Egyptian sponsorship on 19 June and expires on 19 December, is finished because the enemy did not abide by its obligations," said Hamas official Ayman Taha, who respresented the group in talks with other Palestinian factions. "The calm is over."

The truce was due to end tomorrow but has been unraveling ever since Israel crossed into Gaza, killed six Hamas fighters and destroyed a tunnel on 4 November.

So far this week Hamas has fired around 50 rockets. On Wednesday one struck a car park near a supermarket in Sderot, the Israeli town that borders Gaza's northern perimeter and bears the brunt of Palestinian missile attacks.

As the fighting has escalated, Israel has tightened its blockade, forcing the UN's Relief and Works Agency, which feeds 750,000 Palestinian refugees in the coastal territory, to suspend its food deliveries yesterday.

The eruption of violence follows five months of relative calm in which both sides seemed prepared to turn a blind eye to the other's transgressions: Israel maintained its crippling blockade on Gaza and Palestinian militants continued firing a small number of missiles into neighbouring Israeli townships. Now both sides are reassessing.

Earlier in the week, Israel's defence minister, Ehud Barak, reportedly sent negotiator Amos Gilad to Cairo to bid for a last-minute extension but to no avail.

Though publicly neither side is rushing in, both have an interest in maintaining the quiet. For Hamas, the truce was a boon. It allowed it to redeploy its forces from fighting Israel to cracking down on rival militias. As the dominant force in town with a steady flow of cash from the underground tunnels which it controls on its southern border with Egypt, Hamas consolidated its control over the bureaucracy and public law and order.

Meanwhile unemployment in Gaza has climbed to 40%, forcing families, who face power and water cuts for up to 16 hours a day, deeper into poverty.

"Gazans are suffering from an acute economic and social crisis but the Islamic movement is internally secure," said the International Crisis Group's latest report, released on Wednesday. "New elites more dependent on the movement are emerging and basic government functions appear stable.

"Aware that Gazans are suffering and dissatisfied, Hamas leaders blame the outside world and take credit for what has been accomplished despite the siege," it added.

Still, anger is building in Gaza and despite the absence of any democratic mechanisms to depose the often ruthless regime, Hamas is under pressure to find a way to open the crossings to Israel to revive the economy.

For Israel, the truce not only gave the residents of towns such as Sderot reprieve, it deflated the hard right's push for a full-scale invasion of the territory.

The current Israeli government has avoided such an attack, fearing the death of its soliders in Gaza's back alleys as well as the large financial drain.

Yet with the hard right and ultra-nationalists in the ascendancy in the run-up to next year's elections, the Kadima-led coalition government is under pressure to act.

With no real way of dealing with the missiles, Israel may start launching targeted attacks on Hamas's leadership. But that would inevitably result in an escalation of rocket attacks, which is becoming more effective as Hamas's armorers continue to find ways to increase their range.