For the time being, Hamas has chosen to avoid outright war with the Jewish state, but instead to apply sustained, low-intensity pressure through its weekly border riots and organizing terrorist cells in the West Bank. Yet it is simultaneously engaged in a major military build-up, which suggests that it has not entirely been deterred by the previous three Gaza wars. Yaakov Lappin considers Jerusalem’s options:

While Hizballah has for four decades successfully terrorized civilian populations on at least three continents, European states have proved painfully slow to designate it a terrorist group, let alone impose sanctions and other law-enforcement measures. Both the EU itself and France only applied the designation in 2013, but still hold fast to a fictitious distinction between the group’s terrorist “military wing” and its supposedly legitimate “political wing.” Nonetheless, the continent has begun to acknowledge the dangers of Iran’s Lebanon-based proxy, and last year six Central European states banned Hizballah completely. Much credit, writes Alex Benjamin, is due to Tsvetan Tsvetanov, the former deputy prime minister of Bulgaria: