WASHINGTON (AFP) — The intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict has thrust its way to the forefront of the mountain of challenges awaiting president-elect Barack Obama when he takes office in three weeks.
"Obviously, this situation has become even more complicated in the last couple of days and weeks," senior Obama advisor David Axelrod told CBS television Sunday.
But he added Obama, who takes office on January 20, was committed to trying to seal a Middle East peace deal, something which has eluded US presidents for more than five decades.
Obama has been monitoring the situation in Gaza while on holiday in Hawaii and has been briefed by both Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and US intelligence on the unfolding crisis which has left some 345 people dead.
There have been mounting calls for an immediate ceasefire in Israel's bombing campaign unleashed Saturday against Hamas militants who control the Gaza Strip after increased Palestinian rocket attacks on southern Israel.
"The main impact is that there is a greater degree of urgency around American policy on this issue than there was before this operation started," said Tamara Wittes from the Brookings Institution.
"When there was a ceasefire in place, when Syria and Israel were engaged in indirect negotiations and Israel and the Palestinians were at least continuing to talk, there was a better environment that would have allowed the Obama administration to settle in and to choose its time and approach.
"But that's no longer going to be the case."
Obama visited the Israeli town of Sderot, the target of regular Palestinian rocket attacks, in July and said he understood Israel's plight.
"If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that," Obama told the New York Times. "And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."
Unveiling his cabinet earlier this month, Obama stressed the Middle East would be a top priority for his designated secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Axelrod offered assurances that Obama intended to maintain the special, if at times uneasy, relationship between the United States and Israel.
But Obama has continually stressed there is only one president at a time, as he waits to inherit a pile of problems including the sliding American economy as well as two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"The incoming Obama administration still hasn't made clear what direction it is going to take" on the Middle East, said Nathan Brown, an expert from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"I would guess that by the time of the inauguration you would have a ceasefire back in place of some kind, but there will be an awful lot of bad blood."
After several years of quietly putting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on a back-burner, the administration of President George W. Bush sought to kickstart peace talks at an international conference in Annapolis in November 2007.
But its widely publicized pledge to sign a peace deal by the end of 2008 has failed.
Israel's three-day offensive in Gaza and upcoming Israeli elections on February 10 which could return to power hawkish rightwing Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu look set to complicate things even further.
"If Netanyahu is elected, Barack Obama will be more likely to preside over a crisis in US-Israeli relations than a Middle East peace," wrote Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl.
Experts say Obama will benefit from a huge wave of support in the Arab world keen to turn the page on the tainted Bush administration and hopeful of a change in US foreign policy.
Brown said the Palestinians, wearied by decades of conflict, had little faith Obama would be able to make a difference on the ground.
"In the broader Arab world there is still some hope. But if something like the current situation in Gaza happens in the two or three months after his inauguration that would be the end of the honeymoon," he added.
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