Casualties since the ground offensive are up to 765 Palestinians and 14 Israelis, so the UN has drafted a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, after intense lobbying by Arab states.
The Los Angeles Times has two articles, each carefully including one Jewish-sounding name and one Muslim-sounding name in the bylines, on the media coverage of the conflict in Arabic/Arab countries’ and Hebrew/Israeli media respectively. Marc Lynch, at his old blog Abu Aardvark, looked a bit closer at Arabic media framing of the issue last week, pointing out that one gets very different narratives depending on whether the issue is framed as an assault on Gaza or an assault on Hamas. (Abu Aardvark, for those who are interested, is now purely an archive site; read Lynch's new stuff at Foreign Policy's Marc Lynch blog). The LAT articles each seem to suggest that maybe, uh, the coverage isn't that neutral. The article on Israeli news, though, reads a little more like news than the one on Arab coverage, which is more column asserting that Arabic media plays a role in consolidating the idea of Palestine as a symbol for Islam than reporting on the specific nature of the coverage. Of course, it's always a fine line on topics like this, and it isn't shocking to hear that the linguistic community representing the 14 casualties to date has maintained a more ‘objective’ stance than the linguistic community representing 765 casualties.
The Carnegie Endowment had an event last week (on New Year's Eve, actually – do you think they served champagne?) where Paul Salem, Marina Ottoway, Nathan Brown and Amr Hamzawy sounded off on the conflict. Here is the summary page for the event; link to PDF of the event transcript is at the bottom of the page. They predicted that Hamas would emerge from the conflict weaker, and that Lebanon/Hezbollah would avoid the conflict entirely. That was a week ago; they appear to have been somewhat correct regarding Hezbollah, at least so far. I am not sure what foreign policy professionals mean when they say that Hamas will not experience any enhancement in their influence as a result of this conflict. I find this assertion, frankly, very confusing. I understand the logic in Hamzawy's assertion on p. 4 of the event transcript (sorry, I can't c/p from the PDF – in sum, that Hamas’ military resistance to Israel seems to be pretty disastrous for Palestine and that disastrousness should nudge Palestinian public opinion toward supporting other avenues of action), but I think it assumes an eventual outcome that Palestinians would find somewhat upsetting. More specifically, to say that continuous failed military action against Israel on the part of any Palestinian group will discourage support for any military action among Palestinians as a collective implies that sustained, aggressive and decisive military action on the part of Israel will eventually yeild a nonviolent neighboring state in Palestine. This smacks of domination, for one, and doesn't seem to have worked so far. (Let's remember that this is 2009 and we are still discussing a return to 1967 borders). Of course, Anne Applebaum did advocate this week for simply calling a spade a spade and using plain old “war” instead of the euphemistic “peace process”; in that nomenclature, Hamzawy's argument makes a lot more sense.
In sum, the situation remains upsetting. Those with the financial means and the will to donate to UNRWA can do so at their website. We should all hope or pray or whatever spiritual initiative you think appropriate that the organization will be able to get their goods and supplies to the people of Gaza.