THE FORGOTTEN WAR.

Four skittish and dishevelled members of a Hamas rocket team threaded their way down a pitted alley in Beit Hanoun, a destitute town in northernmost Gaza. They stayed close to the walls, searching the sky for the pilotless, missile-firing drones of the Israeli Air Force. It was late July, the fourth week of Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, a conflict eclipsed by Israel's other war, against Hezbollah. The men came near the doorway of the vacant building in which I was hiding. A friend, a Palestinian who had arranged this meeting, stepped into the alley and waved them over. It was 3 A.M.

We walked down a half-flight of steps and into a dark, bare room, where we sat in a semicircle, on cinder blocks. My friend introduced the leader as Abu Obeidah. I had met him several years earlier; he called himself Abu Nasser then. He was thinner than I remembered, and he had the look of a man living on his nerves. He apologized for his unkempt appearance, and for his inability to offer me coffee or tea.

The night provided no respite from the late-summer heat of Gaza, and the men were sweating through their shirts. My friend tore open a small package of dates for them. They seemed embarrassed, but they took the food. "We're always running," Abu Obeidah said. "We haven't slept a night in a long time."

On June 25th, a squad of kidnappers from Hamas--comrades of these rocketeers--and two other factions attacked an Israeli Army position just outside Gaza, killing two soldiers and seizing a third. The soldier, Gilad Shalit, was smuggled into Gaza by tunnel, and is believed to be in the hands of Hamas's Iz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. The Qassam Brigades report to the supreme leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshal, who is based in Damascus. Hamas is a divided organization; its leaders in Damascus are considered more radical than many of those in Gaza. By some accounts, the Hamas Prime Minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, does not know who kidnapped Shalit, or where he is. The Israeli Army's answer to the kidnapping was Operation Summer Rains, a major artillery-and-tank offensive.

Summer Rains is the forgotten Middle East war. Israel's war in Lebanon, Operation Change of Direction, dominated the world's attention this summer. The Lebanon campaign was also set off by a cross-border abduction--in this case, of two Israeli soldiers. Six years ago, under chronic pressure from Hezbollah guerrillas, the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, unilaterally withdrew his forces from south Lebanon, which Israel had occupied as a buffer zone since its invasion in 1982. Hezbollah exploited the 2000 withdrawal by entrenching guerrillas along the border, and by importing, by some estimates, as many as thirteen thousand short- and medium-range rockets from Syria and Iran.

In this latest round of fighting, Hezbollah fired four thousand rockets into Israel. The rockets reached targets thirty miles south of the border, but they killed relatively few civilians--thirty-nine, eighteen of whom were Arabs. The Israeli counterattack left more than a thousand Lebanese civilians dead; killed an unknown, but significant, number of Hezbollah fighters; and inflicted serious damage in south Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and the southern suburbs of Beirut. Still, when a ceasefire was reached, last month, it appeared as if the Israelis had been bested. Hezbollah had fought the Israeli Army to a near-standstill, which on the organization's terms represents a triumph. Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah chief, had become, in a matter of weeks, the most popular political figure in the Arab world, even though he has since admitted that he underestimated the Israeli response to the kidnapping that he ordered.

Hamas, in contrast, was not besting Israel, despite firing its homemade rockets into nearby Israeli towns. Since late June, the Israeli military has killed more than two hundred Gazans, half of them terrorists and the other half civilians, including many children. The world has taken relatively scant notice of the fighting in Gaza. "Do our rocket attacks appear on television in America?" Abu Obeidah asked me. When I told him that most of the news coverage centered on Lebanon, his face fell.