April 24, 2009:
International efforts to get peace talks between Palestinians and Israel going, are failing because of disunity among Palestinians. Not only are Hamas and Fatah not willing to work together (as rival political parties, not rival governments), but many Palestinians are opposed to both Hamas (for its radicalism) and Fatah (for its corruption). The Arab nations are finding it impossible to even get Hamas and Fatah to pretend to unite to negotiate a peace deal with Israel (that would create a Palestinian state.) Hamas is still running its propaganda about eventually destroying Israel and driving all Jews from the Middle East. Hamas appears to be practicing what it is preaching, with preparations continuing for a major attack on Israel.
Violence continues inside Gaza and the West Bank, but a different kind of violence. In Gaza, Hamas is well on its way to establishing a functioning police state. Opponents are being terrorized into inactivity. In the West Bank, Fatah only controls about half the territory. There are many more factions there that have maintained their local power. Some of these groups are terrorists, more interested in carrying out attacks on Israel than in establishing a Palestinian state. The Israelis cope by continuing their counter-terror operations, seeking out and arresting or killing the more active terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank. This war is largely unreported, because both the terrorists and the counter-terror forces keep their secrets. Since the Israelis figured out how to defeat Palestinian terrorists five years ago, you have few suicide bombs going off in Israel, and any attacks that are carried out are low level and crude. The Israeli operations continue to detect and disrupt terrorist operations, which is how they keep the terrorism out of Israel.
The best the Gaza terrorists can do is break the ceasefire and fire a few rockets into Israel each week. In general, terrorists have been more active this year. There appears to be even more desperation among the many terrorists groups to kill Israelis. This is apparently in response to years of frustration in the Palestinian battles with Israel. Hezbollah, and its patron Iran, are also more involved. Iran has growing internal problems, and putting some hurt on Israel would distract angry Iranians from their Iranian aggravations.
Hamas would like to subvert Fatah control of the West Bank, but appears to see another battle Israel happening first. Hamas fighters can be seen training, with new weapons smuggled in from Iran, to use new tactics. Hamas hopes the new weapons and tactics will defeat the new Israeli tactics that so quickly tore through Hamas defenses earlier this year.
April 20, 2009: The 7,000 UN employees who run the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan (where over four million Palestinians live) staged a one day strike for higher wages and more benefits. The UN has had an increasingly hard time raising money for Palestinian refugee camps. Even the Persian Gulf Arabs, long a source of most of the money, are fed up with the Palestinians and their self-destructive ways. Another problem is the Arab insistence that refugees not be absorbed, as is the custom in the rest of the world, but be maintained as refugee communities indefinitely. This doesn't work, and only survives because the UN and other NGOs have been able to raise money to maintain the refugee camps (actually gated communities) and other refugee benefits.
April 16, 2009: Egyptian police found nearly a ton of explosives hidden near the Gaza border, and arrested three Palestinians and two Jordanians in connections with these explosives. This was part of the continuing round-up of Hezbollah backed Palestinian terrorists who were planning terror attacks inside Egypt. Over half the 49 suspected members of this terror operations have been arrested so far, and the rest are being sought. The Egyptians are also cracking down on the Bedouin smuggling gangs that use tunnels to get weapons into Gaza, and knowledge of the desert to get drugs and other contraband into Israel.