In the commentary below The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens profiles the factional militant jostling under way in the Gaza strip – otherwise known as Beelzebub’s Moshpit of Death.

My summary: Iran and Syria are rocking the crowd with their crazy sound, while Security Egypt is nominally holding up the “no stage diving” sign and playing door bitch – they are not exactly fans of the band and are partial to taking anyone that forgets who’s boss around here out the back for a reminder. The Israelis, who thought they owned the place, turned up to the old haunt to find that its not what it used to be and fuller than ever of gangsters that like to play dirty. Not to mention the aweful music.
Pledge your allegiance, here comes the turf war – and someone (well, the band, actually) smuggled the crack in in their underpants (and who knows what the security are selling on the side?). The next track is a screamer, broken necks are inevitable.

(via Winds of Change)

Three Ways to War in Gaza
Who’ll fight–and who’ll manage to stay out?

[..]Last week, Egyptian police in the Sinai intercepted a shipment of 200 crates of guns and ammunition headed for the town of Rafah, which straddles the seven-mile Egyptian-Palestinian border. Also last week, the Israeli army (IDF) discovered 13 smuggling tunnels running under the border in addition to the 12 discovered since June. Israeli intelligence estimates that in the past year at least 19 tons of explosives have been smuggled through these tunnels into Gaza, plus some 15,000 Kalashnikov rifles, 1,000 RPGs, and quantities of Katyusha rockets, Strella antiaircraft missiles and Russian-made Kornet and Metis antitank missiles.

All this is in addition to an indigenous Gazan military industry that produced the hundreds of short-range Kassam rockets that have rained continuously on southern Israel for two years. And it explains why Israeli military planners feel they need to deal Gaza a punishing blow sooner rather than later, when the Palestinians might be in a position to bloody Israel the way Hezbollah did last summer. “We are going to make a massive ground operation in Gaza,” warns Yuval Steinitz, until recently chairman of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, in a recent interview. Underlying the remark is the sense that the IDF will not allow itself to be surprised again by events, much less humiliated twice by ostensibly weaker foes.

[..] In public, the Egyptians generally neither acknowledge nor deny that they are letting the smuggling happen: Acknowledgment risks alienating the U.S. while denial risks enraging their own public opinion. In private, however, Egyptians admit that they condone and perhaps even participate in the smuggling, but only to arm and strengthen Fatah. The arms to Hamas are being shipped, supposedly against Egypt’s wishes, from Iran via Syria and Hezbollah.