Israel’s top brass is saying that its major incursion into Gaza, while very big, is not yet “the big one,” the full-scale invasion and re-occupation of the territory that Israel left in 2005.

It may be a warm-up for that event, much dreaded by so many Israelis and Palestinians, or it may the first of a series of wide-ranging operations aimed at crippling rocket-launching Islamists, blowing up their arsenals and sending a message to Hamas of the price that the Palestinians will pay for the Islamists’ insistent rocket barrages.

Israel is loath to reoccupy Gaza in the same way that it retook the West Bank in 2002 at the height of the intifada. The cost of fighting its way through the overcrowded cities of the Mediterranean strip, both in terms of lost soldiers and international support, would be high.

Israeli commentators point out that when the army took over the West Bank, it operated against Palestinian factions while leaving the day-today administration of the territory’s cities to the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority.

That it could not do with Hamas, which it deems a terrorist organisation, and would find itself having to establish some form of civil administration for 1.5 million Palestinians in an area it itself has deemed a hostile entity.

If Israel does nothing, its security experts fear Hamas will build up a stockpile of Iranian and Syrian missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv. They argue that while acting now may be bloody, it is better than letting the situation fester for years.

Many of the weapons were brought in when Hamas destroyed a border wall with Egypt in January. A major fear for the Jewish state is to be caught between two well-armed proxies of their Iranian arch-foe, Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north.

Israel is hoping that Gazans, long cut off from the world and isolated because of their Hamas leadership, will start to rise up against the Islamists, and see hope in the worse-than-expected turnout at a planned protest rally last week.

While many Gazans resent the rocket fire – which they acknowledge ultimately causes them far more harm than Israel – most are too afraid to stand up to Hamas and its thousands of devoted gunmen. Those who criticize the rocket-launchers are quickly branded traitors, a dangerous epithet in a lawless area racked by nationalist violence.

Hamas for its part is playing a game of brinkmanship, baiting Israel with its rockets and counting on nationalist sentiment to make Gazans back them when Israel attacks with deadly force.

The people of Gaza are caught in between two sides. Isolated economically and diplomatically, Hamas’s leaders appear to be trying to emulate Hezbollah’s 2006 withstanding of an Israeli onslaught while still continuing to fire their rockets, which brought the Lebanese wide-ranging support on the Arab street.

Even as the death toll rose for a second day in Gaza, rockets were still landing in Sderot and Ashkelon, indicating that the bitter battle will keep raging for at least several more days, if not weeks or even months, as happened when Israel stormed Gaza in 2006 following the capture of one of its soldiers.

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