Zaki Chehab, Arab journalist and author of a seminal book on Hamas, surveys the recent war in Gaza:
Walk anywhere in Gaza and the impression one gets is that the Hamas government is still a force to be reckoned with. It shows no signs of losing its grip on this tiny 25-mile by 6-mile strip of land. The Hamas infrastructure that the Israeli army claims to have destroyed was, for the large part, government buildings belonging to the Palestinian Authority – the majority of which were rebuilt in 2002 with European taxpayers’ money as infrastructure for the future Palestinian state, for which even an airport was built in the optimistic days of the late 1990s.