North Korea, Afghanistan and the Mideast are at the forefront of Barack Obama’s foreign agenda. He visited Israel in July with senators Jack Reed, left, and Chuck Hagel./JAMAL NASRALLAH/EUROPEAN PHOTOPRESS AGENCY

By STEVEN LEE MYERS and HELENE COOPER


WASHINGTON - When Presidentelect Barack Obama went to Israel in July - to the very town, in fact, whose repeated shelling culminated in the new fighting in Gaza - he all but endorsed the punishing Israeli attacks now unfolding.

“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,” he told reporters in Sderot, a small city on the edge of Gaza that has been hit repeatedly by rocket fire.“And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”

Now, Mr.Obama’s presidency will begin facing the consequences of just such a counterattack, an attack Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, described as “a war to the bitter end against Hamas and its branches.”It is yet another foreign crisis to deal with the moment Mr.Obama steps into the White House on January 20, even as he and his advisers have struggled mightily to focus on the country’s economic problems.

Since his election, Mr.Obama has said little specific about his foreign policy.“The fact is that there is only one president at a time,”David Axelrod, Mr.Obama’s senior adviser, said recently, reiterating a phrase that has become a mantra of the transition.“And that president now is George Bush.”

Even before the conflict flared again, India and Pakistan announced troop movements that have raised fears of a military confrontation following the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. North Korea scuttled a final agreement on verifying its nuclear dismantlement earlier in December, while Iran continues to stall the international effort to stop its nuclear programs. And there are still two American wars churning in Iraq and Afghanistan. All demand his immediate attention.

Mr.Obama’s election has raised expectations, among allies and enemies alike, that new American policies are forthcoming, putting more pressure on him to signal more quickly what he intends to do. In the case of Israel and the Palestinians, Mr.Obama has not suggested he has any better ideas than President Bush had to resolve the existential conflict between the Israelis and Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza.

“What this does is present the incoming administration with the urgency of a crisis without the capacity to do much about it,”said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and author of“The Much Too Promised Land,”a history of the Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.“That’s the worst outcome of what’s happening right now.”

The renewed fighting has dashed already limited hopes for quick progress on the peace process that Mr.Bush began in Annapolis, Maryland, in November 2007. The omission of Hamas from any talks between the Israelis and President Mahmoud Abbas, who controls only the West Bank, had always been a landmine that risked blowing up a difficult and delicate peace process, but so have Israel’s own internal political divisions.

Mr.Obama might have little to gain from setting out an ambitious agenda for an issue as intractable as the Palestinian- Israeli conflict. But the conflict in Gaza, like the building tensions between India and Pakistan, suggests that he may have no choice.“You can ignore it, you can put it on the back burner, but it will always come up to bite you,”said Ghaith al-Omari, a former Palestinian peace negotiator.

One option would be for an Obama administration to respond much more harshly to Israel’s policies, as many in the Arab world and beyond have long urged.

Or, Mr.Obama could try to pressure surrogates to lean on Hamas, including Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza. He can try to build international pressure on Hamas to stop the rocket attacks into Israel. He can try to nurture a peace between Israel and Mr.Abbas on the West Bank, hoping that somehow it spreads to Hamas. All have been tried, and all have failed.

“The reality is, what options do we have?”Mr.Miller said.