US pressure on Israel to switch gears and focus on targetted precision strikes and killings, rather than indiscriminate bombing of the Gaza Strip, potentially heightens the risk of the war escalating into a regional bust-up and expanding beyond the Middle East.

The heightened risk suggests US efforts to allow Israel to continue attempting to destroy Hamas while minimising civilian Palestinian casualties could backfire. This would further underline that the only way of preventing an escalation, protecting innocent lives, and securing the release of Hamas-held hostages, is a ceasefire.

The question is not if but when Gaza-related violence will spill onto the streets of European and American cities.

This week’s killing in Beirut of Hamas executive Saleh al-Arouri significantly enhanced the threat posed by Hamas, Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, and jihadists.

History repeats itself.

This week’s presumably Israeli killing in Beirut of senior Hamas official Salah al-Arouri raises the spectre of renewed tit-for-tat Palestinian and Israeli killings in third countries.

The jury is out on the degree to which the Gaza war threatens pre-war efforts by Middle Eastern states to freeze their differences and focus on economic and security cooperation.

Controversy over the release of Palestinian tax receipts tests the United States’ ability to pressure Israel and suggests that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s ultra-religious, ultra-conservative government may not survive an end to the Gaza war.

Ziyad al-Nakhalah, the leader of Palestine Islamic Jihad, the second most significant militant Gazan group, arrived in Cairo this week for carefully timed talks with Egyptian intelligence chief General Abbas Kamel.

A Palestinian source said Mr. Al-Nakhalah was discussing an end to the Gaza war that would involve an exchange of prisoners, the withdrawal of Israeli forces, and reconstruction of the devastated territory.

On the table was a three-stage Egyptian proposal that falls short of mutually exclusive Israeli and Palestinian demands.

One would think that heart wrenching images streaming out of the Gaza Strip suggest that Israel has Hamas over a barrel in stalled efforts to revive prisoner exchanges.

Think again. Talks in the past week in Europe between senior Qatari, Israeli, and US officials, and in Cairo between Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad, the second most prominent Gazan group, and Egyptian intelligence in Cairo, suggest otherwise.

A high-flyer at the center of efforts to negotiate temporary pauses and Israeli-Palestinian prisoner swaps, Qatar is catching flack for its relationship with Hamas that has enabled its mediation endeavour.

Even so, the flack, for now, has been drowned out by the Gulf state’s indispensability, established with the tacit endorsement of the United States and Israel.

Israel wasn’t slamming the door on renewed indirect prisoner swap negotiations with Hamas when it this week barred David Barnea, the head of Mossad, the country’s foreign intelligence agency, from travelling to Qatar to explore possibilities for renewed exchanges.

Instead, it was maneuvering for greater leverage in potential talks and expressing doubts about whether Hamas could deliver a second temporary truce in the Gaza war that would make further prisoner swaps possible.

The question is no longer if but when the United States will support a ceasefire in the Gaza war.

While the need for a ceasefire to halt Gaza’s human carnage is self-evident, some drivers of the Biden administration’s debate about the timing of a ceasefire raise questions about the moral underpinnings of Western democracies.