The humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, which ran until 3 p.m. Thursday, has ended. The two sides have already gone back to fighting each other. Hamas fires rockets all over Israel, and Israel tries to strike the organization’s infrastructure, but hits Palestinian civilians along the way.

The Israeli delegation returned from Cairo Thursday morning, where they tried unsuccessfully to reach a ceasefire. According to Egyptian media reports, the delegations from the two sides stayed in a hotel in Cairo, as Egyptian mediators ran between them trying to bring about a truce agreement.

Hamas’s demands in the Cairo talks make it increasingly clear why the organization went to war. Hamas, it seems, initiated an escalation against Israel when its target was really Egypt. Hamas may have aimed its missiles at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but Israel was ultimately a hostage in Hamas’s effort to get closer to Cairo.

Hamas wants this in order to bring an end to the blockade on Gaza, open the Rafah Border Crossing, and in many ways to ensure its survival.

On Tuesday morning, many people in Israel raised an eyebrow at Hamas’s rejection of the Egyptian ceasefire. But if we examine the crisis from the prism of Egypt-Hamas relations, we can see things differently.

Cairo offered the organization the same language it rejected from the outset: quiet for quiet. But for Hamas, the big problem had to do with the way the Egyptian ceasefire was presented to them: At the same time that Razi Hamid, Hamas representative in Gaza, received the Egyptian document, the initiative was already being published in the Egyptian media.

Read the article in full at Times of Israel.