Hamas, Israel, and the European Union

I have been reading lately that Israel and Hamas have agreed a truce. However, I have also read that Israel decided to start the truce by killing six Palestinian militants, leading a Hamas spokesman to vow revenge. So which is it guys, truce or war?

In other news, the European Union is apparently about to upgrade its ties with Israel. In some notional sense, EU links to Israel are tied to Israel's human rights record, but the EU never feels that actions by Israel (such as, you know, killing people or building walls through their country) warrant any invocation of penalty clauses. At a time when even the USA's Condoleeza Rice is making vague noises about Israeli settlement expansion not being such a good idea, the EU is happy to deepen its links to that country.