This time is no different. Since Israel launched its Operation Mighty Cliff on July 8, more than 200 Palestinians had been killed, about a third of them women and children. More than a thousand rockets hit Israeli cities, resulting so far in only one death, thanks to Israel’s immensely effective Iron Dome missile defence system. The international response has so far been equally predictable: criticism of Hamas’s deliberate shelling of civilian targets inside Israel on the one hand, and condemnation of Israel’s heavy handed response in Gaza. There is criticism at home too: Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council, acknowledged that Hamas’s actions constituted a crime against humanity, while the Israeli President Shimon Peres conceded that the killing of Palestinian civilians by Israeli air raids was a moral problem, though he admitted that there may not be a better alternative to stop the incessant firing of rockets.