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Within hours after a three day cease fire which was supposed to take effect, fighting again erupted between Israel and Hamas.

The ceasefire was supposed to begin a 72-hour truce in Gaza, the Israeli military announced two soldiers had been killed, with a third captured by Hamas who emerged from a tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip area.

The New York Times reported, Hamas did not claim responsibility for seizing the soldier, adding another layer of confusion. Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, issued an ambiguous statement several hours after the event denying that it had violated the cease-fire and saying that Israeli troops had advanced into eastern Rafah well before the cease-fire’s 8 a.m. start. It made no mention of a soldier’s capture.

The Times continued to report, Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior official in the political wing of Hamas, had been quoted by Turkish news reports earlier Friday as saying that Hamas had taken a soldier captive but claiming that it had done so before the cease-fire began. Later Mr. Abu Marzouk said on his Twitter account that the Turkish news accounts had misrepresented his remarks and that he had said only that Hamas was told a soldier had been seized.

The conflict to date has cost 1,492 Palestinian and 66 Israeli deaths.

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced the deal Thursday night, giving Palestinians the chance to stock up on essentials, tend to the wounded and bury their dead after more than three weeks of fighting.

This is the fifth attempt at a cease fire since the fighting in Gaza began on July 8th, with Israel attacking Gaza in response to rocket fire launched by Hamas.

Unfortunately, Kerry has made a mess of trying to broker a cease fire by alienating all sides.  President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas was flabbergasted that Kerry would negotiate with Hamas allies Qatar and Turkey, while at the same excluding PA and Egypt from the talks.

By negotiating with Hamas allies, it undercut Egypt’s cease-fire proposal, which Israel accepted and Hamas rejected. This same cease fire was backed by the entire Arab League.  This conflict has made for strange bedfellows, with Israel attacking Hamas, the Arabs also want to see Hamas crushed.

Even at home many have critical of the way Kerry attempted to resolve the crisis a serious blunder of not knowing the situation on the ground.

There are some Republicans who believe Kerry and the President Obama support Hamas, but it’s more that they are naïve in their understanding of the region and players in it.

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer writing in the Washington Post,  Kerry seems oblivious to the strategic reality that Hamas launched its rockets in the hope not of defeating Israel but of ending its intra-Arab isolation (which it brilliantly achieves in the Qatar-Turkey peace proposal). Hamas’s radicalism has alienated nearly all of its Arab neighbors.

Krauthammer points out that;

●Egypt cut it off — indeed blockaded Gaza — because of Hamas’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood and terrorist attacks on Egyptian soldiers in Sinai.

●Fatah, the main element of the Palestinian Authority, is a bitter enemy, particularly since its Gaza members were terrorized, kneecapped, expelled and/or killed when Hamas seized Gaza in a 2007 coup.

●Hamas is non grata in Syria, where it had been previously headquartered, for supporting the anti-government rebels.

●Hamas is deeply opposed by Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, which see it, correctly, as yet another branch of the Islamist movement that threatens relatively moderate pro-Western Arab states.

Kerry and the president continually have a naïve view of the Middle East and this is just one more example of not knowing the region and the players in it.