The latest round of hostilities between Israel and Hamas ended on Thursday with a ceasefire agreement between the two sides, and, on the face of it, very little has changed after eleven days of violence and almost 250 lives lost.
Hamas is still in control inside the Gaza Strip, Israel retains its vice grip on Gaza’s borders. Benjamin Netanyahu is still Israel’s prime minister, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is still irrelevant. This, at any rate, is the picture you get if you look at the conflict through the prism of “two states”, where the issue is friction between the Israeli government in Jerusalem on the one side and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and the Hamas government in Gaza on the other.
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