After three days of fighting with Israel, the military wing of Hamas announced Wednesday that it was ready to accept a cease-fire brokered by Egypt. The exchange of Israeli airstrikes and Hamas rocket fire followed an Israeli retaliation against a Palestinian attack launched from the Egyptian-ruled Sinai Peninsula, which has seen a rise in violence amid that country's broader upheaval.
Yoram Meital, chair of the Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies and Diplomacy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told Trend Lines that if the fighting in the Israel-Gaza-Egypt border junction continues, all three sides could be pulled into a crisis.
"We should not see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a bilateral perspective, but rather from a multilateral perspective," he said, explaining that the past 18 months of change in Egypt have contributed to the increase in hostile activity at the triple border junction. "The Sinai Peninsula is Egyptian sovereign territory," he added, "and its security depends more than any other factor on developments in the Gaza Strip and the ongoing confrontations between Israel and Hamas."