Days after Israeli armored forces amassed on the Gaza border and a major escalation loomed after last week’s destruction of a home in central Israel by a Hamas rocket, the tension swiftly died down.
Most Israeli reinforcements are still stationed around the territory, but senior Israeli officials confirmed that indirect talks, brokered by Egypt, are underway on a long-term plan to rehabilitate the Gaza Strip and gradually remove the blockade.
While Israeli ministers are not interested in publicising the talks before the election for fear of “seeming weak” towards Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister in Gaza, acknowledged on Wednesday that they had received a timetable for talks with the Egyptians on a long-term ceasefire plan.
In last Friday’s protests, in which around 40,000 Palestinians took part, three Palestinians, all aged 17, where shot dead by Israeli fire and 316 were wounded. The violence around Gaza has gradually died down since. According to the IDF, the Palestinians shot on the border were trying to break through the fence and attack Israeli forces.
Shortly after midnight on Saturday, five rockets were fired towards Israel and landed in empty areas in the Negev desert. A sixth rocket was fired in the afternoon and fell short within Gazan territory. The rockets are believed to have been fired by the Islamic Jihad organisation and, despite them, Israel has reopened the border crossings for goods shipments and the travel of Palestinians with permits. In a more significant move, fishing off the Gaza Strip has been reallowed in a fifteen nautical-mile area, the widest in over a decade.
While Gaza may have calmed down for now, Hamas is creating another source of tension through the thousands of its members who are in Israeli prisons with a planned hunger strike on Sunday. The immediate reason is their demand the Israeli Prison Service stop using electronic countermeasures to block mobile phone reception in their wards. Despite the efforts by the service to block smuggling of phones into cells, hundreds are reported to be in active use.
In the background, there is an expectation on the Palestinian side that as part of ongoing negotiations on a long-term ceasefire, there will be also a release of prisoners in exchange for two Israeli citizens held in Gaza and the bodies of two Israeli soldiers.
Israeli ministers have denied that such an exchange is in the works. Whether or not there are secret talks for a prisoner deal, the fact that the hunger strike is about to start two days before the Israeli election is hardly coincidental and is part of Hamas’s attempts to overshadow the event.
