Others, though, speculate that the border breach could create momentum for a larger incursion into Gaza, something Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, chastened by his disastrous 2006 invasion of Lebanon, has so far avoided. A large-scale ground attack is now “much more likely,” says Yuval Steinitz, a member of the Likud party who sits on a key defense committee. An open border, he argues, will make it easier to carry in long-range rockets too big to smuggle through tunnels. “We have no other alternative,” Steinitz says. For their part, the Egyptians appeared eager to slow the tide. Police formed a human chain along the fence permitting Gazans to flow in only one direction: home.
