NEW YORK: Egypt is leading a new coalition of Arab states — including Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — that has effectively lined up with Israel in its fight against Hamas that controls the Gaza Strip, says the New York Times in a report published on Thursday.

The newspaper said that after the military ouster of the Islamist government in Cairo last year, Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi might have contributed to the failure of the antagonists to reach a negotiated ceasefire even after more than three weeks of bloodshed.

Battling Hamas in Gaza two years ago, Israel found itself pressed from all sides by unfriendly Arab neighbours to end the fighting.

However, the newspaper says “the Arab states’ loathing and fear of political Islam is so strong that it outweighs their allergy to Benjamin Netanyahu,” the prime minister of Israel, said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Wilson Centre in Washington and a former Middle East negotiator under several presidents.

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“I have never seen a situation like it, where you have so many Arab states acquiescing in the death and destruction in Gaza and the pummelling of Hamas,” he said.

“The silence is deafening”, the newspaper quoted Mr Miller as saying.

Published in Dawn, August 1st, 2014