Gaza violence prompts call for outside help

"What do they want to do? How can they reestablish security?" asks Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesperson in Gaza. "How do I know if they want to come here to protect one side?"

But in addition to the fact that Hamas remains opposed to the idea, Palestinian analysts say it is unclear whether the Arab governments will want to send forces to jump in the middle of the Hamas, Fatah – and Israeli – melee.

"The question is do Arabs want to get involved, to what extent, and who are the Arabs who are willing to be involved," says Mohammed Dejani, a political scientist at Al Quds University. "It is not an easy task, and it is not a thankful task. They will be sacrificing, and they will be targeted, maybe not militarily but politically."

Dejani says that Palestinians are likely to consider a multinational force as simply a new form of foreign occupation. The peacekeepers, on the other hand, won't relish the idea of running down Kassam rocket launching teams or patrolling Gaza neighborhoods where fighting often flows from house to house.

On Monday, a group of left-wing Israeli lawmakers traveled to the West Bank city of Ramallah to discuss the idea of a peacekeeping force led by Jordanian and Egyptian forces. Knesset Member Avshalom Vilan, from the Meretz Party, speculated that Israel wouldn't be able to resist an intervention plan that has the support of the US allies and the Palestinians. The Israeli politician said Abbas didn't reject the idea, but was noncommittal.

"He expressed interest," he says. "He said [that] it's a plan that he wants to study, and that he would get back to us."

International peacekeepers are in Israel's interest because the internal Palestinian fighting spilled over the border last month, creating pressure on Israel's army to reenter Gaza to carry out retaliation strikes.

"If there is a force that will go in, stop the Kassams and create a different reality, how can Israel say no?" asks Mr. Vilan.

During last month's escalation in Israeli-Palestinian cross-border attacks around Gaza, Israeli officials also expressed interest in an international force to deploy along the porous Gaza-Egyptian border to help stop weapon smuggling.

The international border team could be based partly on UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. The Lebanon peacekeepers have had mixed success from the Israeli perspective. On the one hand, it has kept Hizbullah forces from redeploying near the Israeli border in southern Lebanon, but it has not stopped the supply of arms from Syria over the western border with Lebanon, Israel has charged.

And yet, Israel's decision to agree to UNIFIL keeping security in south Lebanon marked a shift in its traditionally skeptical view of the efficacy of international peacekeepers.

"We didn't leave Gaza to return, and yet there is a very real problem of smuggling," says one official. "The idea of having an international force on the border combined with an Egyptian force on their side of the border would prevent Israel from having to come back to Gaza."

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