ISRAEL gave Egypt and the Palestinian Authority advance notice of Operation Cast Lead, asking both of them to run the show in the Gaza Strip once Hamas was deposed, according to one of the diplomatic cables published in Sunday by WikiLeaks.

We all know what happened next. Some 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed during the three-week military assault in December 2008 and January 2009.

In addition, 13 Israelis also died during campaign, which was intended to stop Hamas rocket attacks against Israel. But the one-hundred-to- one disproportionality in the death tolls is ample evidence of the brutality of the exercise.

The revelation that Mubarak and Abbas were onside all along strikes me as rather more substantial than many of the non-stories have dominated world headlines for the last two days.

Sure, the overtures were rejected. But that Tel Aviv felt able to have these kinds of conversations says much about the real alignments in Middle East politics.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports:

In a June 2009 meeting between Defense Minister Ehud Barak and a U.S. congressional delegation, Barak claimed that the Israeli government “had consulted with Egypt and Fatah prior to Operation Cast Lead, asking if they were willing to assume control of Gaza once Israel defeated Hamas.”

“Not surprisingly,” Barak said in the meeting, Israel “received negative answers from both.”

Let us sum up what we can conclude from the episode. Fatah and Hamas have effectively been at war since 2006, and the bitterness is of such a degree that Israel thought it worth a shot that Fatah would offer tacit endorsement for what it was about to undertake.

Egypt’s regime is sometimes moved to rhetorical support for Palestinian nationalism. Yet it is just as much responsible for maintaining the blockade on Gaza as Israel. Funnily enough, this is something most Palestine solidarity campaigners choose for one reason or another not to highlight.

Even at the height of Operation Cast Lead, the Egyptians only sent medicine and medical supplies through the Rafah border, with all other humanitarian goods going through the Israeli crossing at Kerem Shalom.

Hamas is not the kind of movement for which anyone sane would want to cheerlead. But on account of the degree of support it enjoys among those who live in Gaza, it is indispensible to any just settlement of the Palestinian question.

Such a process is not facilitated by Israel’s murderous armed incursions into the Gaza Strip. Clearly Hamas will now be asking itself exactly who its friends in the region are. Its isolation, it seems, is pretty much absolute.