Netanyahu wants to wholly demilitarize the Palestinian enclave, beginning with the network of tunnels that allow Hamas’s fighters to infiltrate into Israeli territory. But Hamas, a dogged outfit that thrives in wartime, is digging in its heels. On Tuesday, a Hamas spokesman said Netanyahu’s “threats did not frighten Hamas or the Palestinian people.”

The current fighting — a clash between Israel’s vastly superior armed forces and Hamas’s insurgents — obscures the greater challenges facing Israelis and Palestinians, including the thorny question of how to accord equal rights to millions of Palestinians living under occupation in the event that a separate Palestinian state turns out not to be viable.

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