Tim Blair unearths some interesting and not widely-reported facts about the West Bank and Gaza.

Birzeit University pollster Nader Said, who has monitored emigration attitudes for 12 years, says the percentage of Palestinians willing to relocate once hovered just below 20 percent. When that figure jumped to 32 percent in a September survey, Mr. Said says he was shocked.

The catalyst, the pollster says, has been Palestinian disillusionment following Hamas’s half-year in government. “What the Israelis were unable to do - try to push the Palestinian out of the country - the internal strife is achieving,” he says.

Wow. Talk about your law of unintended consequences.

It seems we can expect a lot more unintended consequences in the very near future according to Bret Stephens notes developments in Gaza that suggest Hamas is staging for war">Bret Stephens.

Here, then, is the third circumstance: The rise of Hamas, with ties to Iran and potentially a secure territorial base of its own, is an even greater long-term threat to the brittle regime of Hosni Mubarak than it is to Israel. Consider the Kabuki dance being played around the fate of Cpl. Shalit. The Egyptians have been negotiating his release for months, probably in good faith: They fear that indefinite detention might lead to a full-scale Israeli invasion of Gaza, which would have spillover effects in the Sinai. At the same time, Mr. Mubarak has been ratcheting up the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas's sister organization in Egypt, by canceling elections the Brotherhood seemed likely to win and tinkering with the election law to further shut it out of the political process. Poor 19-year-old Cpl. Shalit is being played by Hamas as a card in two separate games: with the Israelis for the release of Palestinian prisoners and with the Egyptians for political concessions in Cairo.

The political heat between the two sides was noticeably raised last week when Hamas Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar reportedly warned Egypt that if it failed to open its border with Gaza "there will be no border." Equally extraordinary was that the statement was widely reprinted in the Egyptian state media, playing into the broad suspicion that the Brotherhood, as a religious organization, is fundamentally anti-Egypt in the national sense. "Now the line is, 'No more foreign ministry,'" says an Egyptian source, suggesting the Mubarak regime is quickly moving away from diplomacy to more aggressive forms of persuasion with Hamas.

If Egypt or Israel had the luxury of choice they would abandon Gaza to its own miserable devices, or--even better--to each other. But that's not how it works in the Middle East. The war for Gaza is coming, no matter who does the fighting. Whoever stays out of it wins.