Israel, Hamas Headed Toward War?

The Israel Defense Forces on Saturday night killed at least three armed Palestinians – reportedly members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad – who were attempting to cross the security fence located along the Gaza Strip border. It was the fourth attempted infiltration from Gaza into Israel over the past two-plus weeks. The latest incident came shortly after terrorists for the second day in a row launched rockets from the coastal enclave into southern Israel, to which the IDF responded by striking underground infrastructure belonging to Hamas. Tensions are beginning to boil over between the sides after a few months of relative calm, which, in turn, followed a major flare-up in May and over a year of weekly, violent mass protests by Gazans along the frontier. The recent conflagrations have effectively shattered a tentative truce forged mid-summer that was meant to avert a fourth war in Gaza in the past decade.