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On Thursday night Israel sent its military forces into the northern part of the Gaza Strip in its efforts to destroy underground tunnels used by Hamas militants to attack Israel.

This latest incursion by Israel into Gaza followed a failed effort by Egypt to broker cease fire between Israel and Hamas.  Israel accepted the terms of the cease fire, unfortunately Hamas rejected the terms because it did not actually address the need to end the blockade of Gaza.

Presently Gaza is surrounded with only food and medical supplies coming in from Israel.  The last time Hamas and Israel engaged each other was in 2012, but then they had a sympathetic ally in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood supporting Hamas.

In this latest conflict Egypt under the leadership of President Abdel Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil el-Sisi has a strained relationship with Hamas if not outright hostile.

The New York Times reported Israeli leaders said the incursion was a limited one focused on tunnels into its territory like the one used for a predawn attack Thursday that was thwarted. They said it was not intended to topple Hamas, the militant Islamist movement, from its longtime rule of Gaza.

“We will strike Hamas and we are determined to restore peace to the state of Israel,” the military spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, told reporters in a conference call. “It will progress according to the situation assessment and according to our crafted and designed plan of action to enable us to carry out this mission.”

The Jerusalem Post reported at the opening of an emergency cabinet meeting in Tel Aviv, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said “Since there is no way to deal with the tunnels only from the air, our soldiers are doing it now from the ground,” Netanyahu continued, “We decided to launch the action after we tried all the other ways, and with an understanding that without this operation the price we will have to pay later would be much higher.”

The New York Times reported that Israel began to call up 18,000 reservists, adding to 50,000 already mobilized in recent days; Lt. Col Lerner said the ground forces would include infantry and artillery units, armored and engineer corps, supported by Israel’s “vast intelligence capabilities,” air force and navy.

Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas, called the invasion “a dangerous step.” Barhoum continued, “The occupation will pay its price expensively,” he said in a statement, referring to Israel, “and Hamas is ready for confrontation.”

The New York Time gave a brief background of the conflict as Israel did not send ground troops into Gaza during eight days of cross border violence in 2012. It was condemned internationally for an intense three-week air-and-ground campaign in 2008-9, when 1,400 Palestinians were killed along with 13 Israelis in fierce street fighting. Israel originally seized the territory in the 1967 war and evacuated its settlers and soldiers in 2005, but maintained restrictions on imports, exports and travel for the Palestinians left behind.

At this point one has to ask is what is each side trying to achieve Military Analyst Anthony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies commented Israel will probably limit its military efforts to the point where it feels it has deterred Hamas for some period of time, create a new ceasefire of an uncertain length, and confront Hamas with either finding new and far more sophisticated missiles or trying to get numbers so large that a volley could saturate Israel’s missile defenses and compensate for their lack of accuracy and lethality. This outcome seems dubious as long as Egypt continues to crack down on Palestinian tunnels and shipments across its border.

Cordesman continued, Israel, however, will not have won except at the tactical level. It will still have to tailor a major part of its security effort to deal with whatever threat emerges after this round of fighting, deal with the challenge of containing more than 1.8 million people, and deal with the risk that it will face much broader hostility from the Palestinians, and the present moderate Palestinian Authority will collapse. It will still have to go on dealing with the broad hostility of the Arab world and Iran, and deal with the fact many countries see its use of force as excessive and Israel as guilty of human rights abuses and blocking the peace process.

At some point Israel will end its incursion into Gaza when it feels it has accomplished its goal of eliminating as much as possible the threat emanating from Hamas.

At some point Hamas will seek a cease fire as they are blockade from all sides including from Egypt, only then will the conflict ebb to a simmering volcano until the next crisis erupts.