Israel's decision to temporarily lift the total fuel supply embargo it imposed last week on the Gaza Strip has eased immediate conditions for its inhabitants, but highlights the desperate plight most of them still have to endure. The United Nations was about to suspend its emergency food aid to 860,000 people because it was running short of fuel for generators and trucks, while hundreds of thousands were left without electricity over the weekend, including hospitals and essential services.
Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert insists the blockade will last as long as Hamas engages in military actions against Israeli targets, mostly rocket and mortar attacks on cross-border towns. Their intensification occasioned last week's fuel embargo. But international critics are right to describe Israeli sieges as collective punishment of the entire Gaza population for the actions of a small minority. This is outlawed under the Geneva Conventions - as too are all measures of intimidation or terrorism. Israel's decision to ease the fuel embargo should be followed by renewed efforts to reach a mutual ceasefire with Hamas which would bring an end to the recent rocket firings and Israeli counter-attacks in which too many have died. That would allow the border crossings to open as well.
Not to follow this course would be tantamount to perpetuating and deepening the conflict, thereby gravely endangering the wider negotiations initiated under a United States and international umbrella at Annapolis last year. They were given encouragement by President Bush in Jerusalem and the West Bank earlier this month and are continuing under these auspices. They now include core elements of the conflict. It will be impossible to keep them going if they are peppered by parallel outbreaks of fighting between Hamas and the Israelis.
While the Israeli military wants to maintain the siege and keep up the counter-attacks this does not automatically benefit Mr Olmert's Palestinian interlocutors, President Mahmoud Abbas and prime minister Salam Fayyad. Many Gazans resent the hardships, in which 79 per cent of them are condemned to live in poverty according to a UN report published yesterday. But they do not blame Hamas for all of these conditions, finding Israel equally or more culpable, and are not willing to embrace Mr Abbas's Fatah movement so soon after voting against it in the 2006 Palestinian elections.
There is no military solution to Israel's conflict with Hamas. If it is pursued along these lines it seems bound to escalate into all-out war. Unless a way is found to include Hamas, the current peace talks will fail.