The tension is also seen as a message to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, led by president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah party, which is trying to build bridges with Hamas, who control the Gaza Strip.

Fatah has played no part in the latest fighting.

Indeed, Yasser Abed Rabbo, a key Abbas advisor, has charged that Israel and Hamas "invented a war" to stymy Abbas's efforts to reconcile Fatah with its long-time rival.

After 10 days of strikes and counter-strikes, a general calm appeared to have returned to the tense Israeli-Gaza border on Friday, despite an air strike on Sunday that killed two members of Islamic Jihad.

That was broken late Tuesday by a missile fired from Gaza into southern Israel, but it landed harmlessly in a field, an Israeli police spokesman said.

The latest round of clashes began on March 16 when a rocket from Gaza targeted an Israeli town near the border, though it caused no casualties or property damage.

But the subsequent Israel air strike killed two militants at a training ground of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas's armed wing.

A Hamas official quoted by the International Crisis Group (ICG) said the Israeli action violated what the Islamist group considered the "reasonable rules of the game: that when Palestinian projectiles hit open space ... Israel aims at open space in response."

Naji Sharab, a political science professor at Gaza's Al-Azhar University, said "Israel sent a strong message to Hamas and, in turn, got one from Hamas" -- that its "power of response and resistance have developed quite substantially."

Sharab said Hamas let itself be drawn into a confrontation "banking on the fact that Israel will not unleash a new war because the regional environment won't permit it".

In December 2008, Israel launched a three-week assault on Gaza in response to persistent rocket fire, in which some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died.

As the ICG says: "Israelis feel on the defensive in more than one theatre," citing both Gaza and the West Bank, adding that the Jewish state bears much of the blame abroad for the breakdown in peace talks with the Palestinians.

"This state of affairs arguably leads Israel to tread cautiously so as not to further inflame the situation; it also knows that the last thing the US administration wants is an Israeli-Palestinian war that might negatively affect regional developments."

As one former defence official said, Israel cannot push too far and must remain "under the international radar".

Defence Minister Ehud Barak put it more colourfully when, in remarks published by daily newspaper Haaretz, he said: "We stand to face a diplomatic tsunami that the majority of the public is unaware of."

However, Sharab says the de facto truce between Israel and Hamas is fragile because it is not based on security or political considerations.

It is linked instead "to circumstantial interests and could collapse with the firing of a rocket from Gaza or the assassination of a Palestinian leader."

For his part, Al-Azhar political science professor Mukhaimer Abu Saada adds that Hamas does not have a long-term strategy regarding the truce.

Hamas had even "opened a limited front" with Israel, he said, to distract from Gaza's economic and political problems and calls among Palestinian youth for Hamas and Fatah to sort out their differences.

Two weeks ago, Abbas accepted a Hamas invitation to travel to Gaza in a bid to end their division, but the latest violence meant that talks for that visit got put on the back-burner.

Sharab expressed a similar view to that of Abi Saada, suggesting that Hamas wanted to turn the circumstances of any eventual Abbas visit to its own benefit.

Abed Rabbo was even more blunt on Monday: he suggested that Hamas did not want a deal.

"Last week, a war was invented in the Gaza Strip with the blessing of Israel," he said.

"It has ended with a calm and even with a public exchange of messages between Hamas and Israel. All these attempts that aim at mixing the cards and spoiling the president's initiative (for reconciliations) should stop."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meanwhile has made no secret of how he feels about these manoeuvres.

"We hear in recent days that the Palestinian Authority is thinking of uniting with Hamas," Netanyahu told Jewish fundraisers in a speech on Monday.

"It's thinking of effecting peace, not with Israel, but with Hamas," he continued.

"Well, I say to them something very simple: you can't have peace with Israel and Hamas. It's one or the other, but not both."

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