French press review 16 July 2014

Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip continues to cost lives. Brics members look at candidates that could extend their clout.

When Le Monde went to press at lunchtime yesterday, the headline on the Israel-Palestinian conflict read "Diplomatic pressure for a truce". The electronic edition of the same newspaper, updated just a few minutes ago, reads "Further deaths as Israel intensifies raids on Gaza."

Israeli jets struck the homes of several alleged Hamas leaders overnight, killing at least seven people.

The centrist paper expects things to get worse in the next few hours, following the warning by the Israeli military authorities to 100,000 Gazans to evacuate their homes.

Le Figaro gives the same story front-page prominence, under the headline "Hamas rejects truce, Israel toughens stance". Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is quoted as saying "If there's no cease-fire, we will respond with fire".

The conservative paper's editorial describes this endless war as a fight for nothing.

Hamas is divided on the question of strategy between a political wing which accepts the need for negotiation and an armed hardcore which continues to fire rockets in the direction of Israel, knowing that the Iron Dome security system will prevent them from ever reaching an inhabited target but also that the Jewish state will not stand quietly by and allow the neighbours to continue their belligerence.

Le Figaro lists the 2008 surge in hostilities, followed by that of 2012, saying that the pointlessness has become almost routine. The people of Gaza continue to suffer; the ranks of the Israeli radicals are presumably boosted by Palestinian attacks. The comprehension gap between the two peoples widens daily and international diplomacy seems incapable of making the slightest bit of difference.

Catholic La Croix gives the honours to the so-called Brics nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), currently having their annual summit meeting in Brazil.

Items on the agenda include the possible creation of an alternative development bank for emerging economies, ways in which the Brics bloc can exert more coordinated influence on the global economy and the possible enlargement of the group to include places like Indonesia, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Nigeria and Mexico. That will, of course, make a terrible mess of the current acronym, but it would certainly give the emerging nations more global clout.

Part of the problem is that some member nations - the big example is China - have a major interest in the mainstream economy but are being forced to act like emerging nations by the current economic climate and their own internal inequalities. The future of the Brics alternative to a bipolar economic model - ie rich countries versus poor ones - is thus brought seriously into question. South Korea has proved that a passage through the Brics phase is not at all necessary for national economies aspiring to join the “developed world”.