The Norwegian mediators had first appeared in 1999, and would leave seven years later, despised, defeated and utterly baffled. It had been a confusing period. To begin with, everyone seemed conciliatory, and, in 2002, the great truce was signed. But it wasn’t long before the peace began to look like warfare cloaked in denial. Over the next four years, the Norwegians would count 351 treaty violations by the army and 3,830 by the LTTE. The mediators must often have wondered what they were doing here, and whether anyone wanted this war to end. Every day, they’d set out from the olive compound,
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Exactly the Israel-Hamas story.
