Q. Against a backdrop of ongoing warfare in and around Gaza, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is escalating his threats to remove the Hamas-led PA government. Where are Israeli-Palestinian relations heading?

A. Probably toward heightened warfare and increased anarchy. The overall Israeli-Palestinian situation can be characterized as a series of contradictions and confrontations that do not point to an easy way out.

On the internal Palestinian scene, Abbas (Abu Mazen) is throwing a bewildering mix of threats at Hamas, to be acted upon unless it accepts the three conditions proffered by Israel and the Quartet (recognition of Israel, acceptance of past Israeli-PLO agreements and cessation of violence) and agrees to a prisoner swap. One day he demands a unity government with Fateh; the next he talks about appointing a technocrat government; then he threatens to declare an emergency and hold new elections for the parliament, the presidency or both, or a referendum.

In fact, under the Palestinian Authority constitution, as amended in Arafat's day under American and Israeli pressure to reduce the president's authority, Abbas cannot appoint a new government, initiate elections or declare an emergency for longer than a month without approval from the parliament, where Hamas has a majority. Unless, of course, he wants to take advantage of the fact that Israel has incarcerated about half the Hamas parliamentary deputies, in which case Abbas' actions would be understood as a coup d'etat perpetrated with Israeli connivance.

But a coup would almost certainly generate a civil war between Hamas and Fateh. Even now there are daily fire-fights and assassination attempts, most recently against PM Ismail Haniyeh himself, with dozens of casualties on both sides.

Abbas' most telling critique of the Hamas government is that it cannot provide Palestinians, especially in Gaza, with even a minimum standard of living. He recently voiced the slogan "bread before democracy", seemingly justifying a future coup attempt of some sort. Palestine is rife with rumors that a strong-arm move by Abbas, with Israeli and American blessings, will take place immediately after this week's Eid al-Fitr holiday.

Abbas, needless to say, is not known for taking forceful decisions. If he does try to move against Hamas, it will also strike a heavy blow against America's democratic reform program for the region, which brought Hamas to power last January 25 in impeccably democratic elections.

Who would win in a Palestinian civil war? In Gaza, where Hamas has increasingly placed its people in command of the security services, it would have the edge, while in the West Bank Fateh would probably prevail. In fact the situation, especially in Gaza, would look more and more like Somalia.

Factor into this near-anarchic reality the escalating military tension between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The Qassams continue to fall, albeit in small numbers, in and around Sderot. Far more threateningly, the influx of smuggled weaponry and explosives via tunnels dug under the Gaza-Sinai border is of growing concern to the IDF. Hamas has consciously opted to emulate Hizballah in Lebanon, digging sophisticated reinforced concrete fortifications and deploying advanced anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. Money, weapons and explosives experts are all infiltrating from Sinai, with Syria and Iran supporting the buildup from afar.

The Egyptians on their side of the philadelphi fence seem powerless to stop the smuggling, despite overall good intentions. Last week two IDF units penetrated four km. west of the Gaza-Israel border along the philadelphi road and uncovered no fewer than 13 tunnels. Estimates of the total number of active smuggling tunnels under the border run as high as 100! In the northern Gaza Strip, Israeli units have returned more or less permanently to the area of the now-destroyed settlements of Alei Sinai and Dugit in an effort to push back rocket-launching teams aiming for Ashkelon.

If Hamas is emulating Hizballah, Israeli security authorities declare themselves determined not to repeat their mistake of recent years on Israel's northern border, when they sat back and watched the fortifications being dug and the arms build-up proceed. Hence preparations have begun for a new IDF offensive that would be far more ambitious than the relatively minor and short-lived forays into Palestinian rocket-launching and tunnel-digging territory in Gaza of recent months.

As leaked to the Israeli media by senior officers, the operation would involve reoccupation of the philadelphi strip and possibly the city of Rafah, which straddles the Gaza-Sinai border, along with a deeper penetration in the northern Strip to try to stop the Qassams. The idea would be to create a new reality of constant and relatively easy Israeli access to trouble spots deep inside Gaza. This would emulate the way Israel changed the reality in Jenin and Nablus in the West Bank with Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, ensuring that the West Bank refugee camps would no longer be off limits for the Israeli military. It would also signal the ultimate collapse of the disengagement strategy that led Israel out of Gaza in August 2005.

PM Ehud Olmert will presumably wait until after his visit with US President George W. Bush, scheduled for just after mid-term elections in early November, before making a decision regarding military escalation in Gaza. Meanwhile it appears that only a decision by Hamas to relax its terms for a prisoner exchange and a unity government and to accept the three Quartet/Israeli conditions might cause a longer postponement. Alternatively, a coup or takeover attempt by Abbas, if deemed potentially successful in Gaza, might also cause Israel to reconsider.

Notably, the drama in and around Gaza is taking place or threatening to happen while Israeli security authorities and the political echelon are increasingly preoccupied with threats from Iran, not Palestine. Nor is the Israeli public likely to welcome an escalated round of fighting in Gaza, with the IDF losses and increased rocket attacks on Israeli civilians that it is likely to entail, so soon after Lebanon.

Q. Apropos Iran, Olmert issued a fairly explicit warning to Tehran during his visit last week to Moscow. What would be the Israeli rationale for attacking Iran?

A. Olmert stated, "The Iranians should fear the dangers and consequences of their actions, and I won't go into details". His Russian host, President Vladimir Putin, went to some lengths to contradict the implications of Olmert's statement and insist on a peaceful solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis. But Putin also offered little by way of encouragement that Russia would join a strong sanctions regime, while Olmert continued to insist that the Iranian nuclear program must be prevented "by all possible means".

Olmert's unusual statement aside, Israel generally adheres to a policy that emphasizes the dangers posed by Iran to the entire Middle East region and the international community, rather than to Israel specifically, and supports diplomatic efforts, backed by firm threats and sanctions, to persuade Iran to desist. Israel can also take satisfaction in the results of the recent Lebanon war with regard to Iran: Hizballah, the long arm of Iran in Lebanon, has been removed from the Lebanon-Israel border, thereby weakening Tehran's capacity to threaten Israel, while the moderate Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, have evinced a readiness to cooperate with Israel against Iran.

But Israeli security thinkers are well aware that international diplomatic efforts might fail. The recent North Korean nuclear explosion merely drove home the recognition that a determined third world regime can obtain a military nuclear capability if it puts its mind to the task. Iran, unlike North Korea, has the oil riches to fuel a nuclear program without impoverishing its population. And it also has ambitions for regional hegemony and a deep-seated religion-based enmity toward Israel that North Korea does not display.

Hence any Israeli leader could conceivably face the following reality in a year or two:

1. Sanctions and international diplomatic efforts have failed, and the United States is not prepared to use decisive military means to stop the Iranians, whether because of governmental paralysis (election time, lame-duck administration), the election of a new administration that shuns armed confrontation with Iran in the aftermath of disastrous failure in Iraq, or a new American national security assessment that judges it possible to live with an Iranian bomb, just as the US is prepared ultimately to live with a North Korean bomb.

2. The Iranian regime continues to demonstrate, through its actions and statements, strong hostility toward Israel, even as it advances toward nuclear weapon status.

3. The Iranian leadership's rhetoric and behavior, backed by the nuclear threat, electrifies the Arab "street" and increasingly forces moderate regimes to compromise with Tehran and accommodate its regional hegemonic ambitions.

4. The IDF announces that if Iran attacks with a barrage of nuclear missiles, it cannot guarantee Israel's defensive capability to prevent at least one from striking the country, thereby potentially causing a twenty first century holocaust--precisely the kind of destruction of the Jewish people that Israel was created to prevent.

Under these circumstances, and even though a preemptive Israeli attack on Iran might have highly destabilizing consequences for the region and might do little more than set back Iran's nuclear ambitions by a few years, no Israeli leader, whether from the left, the center or the right, is likely to abstain from taking action.