Israel announced a unilateral ceasefire on Saturday in its 22-day counteroffensive in the Gaza Strip.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says troops will remain in Gaza for the short term and will pull out if Hamas holds its fire.

Meanwhile, Hamas declared on Saturday that it would keep fighting until Israel left Gaza and opened all the border crossings into Gaza.

In announcing the ceasefire, Olmert declared that Israel had achieved its goals. Such a statement is hard to fathom considering the primary goal of the operation was to stop rocket fire from Gaza, and Hamas still managed to fire about 30 rockets into southern Israel on Saturday—eight of them around the time Olmert spoke, and at least one after the ceasefire announcement.

Moreover, while Hamas has taken a hit militarily, it has achieved a political victory. As Agence-France Presse writes, according to analysts Hamas “could rise from the rubble with substantial political gains and a new role as a regional player.” afp continues (emphasis ours):

Hamas … aimed to keep its grip on Gaza and to burnish its political credentials by gaining de facto international recognition of its takeover in June 2007, when it routed forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas.Hamas has built its grassroots support via a vast network of welfare programs throughout the occupied West Bank and Gaza—decades of work that paid off in the January 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, when the Islamists surprised everyone including themselves by sweeping the polls.A year and a half later the group booted forces loyal to the Western-backed Abbas out of the Gaza Strip, cementing its grip over the enclave and burnishing the image of its armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades.It is unlikely to lose its power base despite the unrelenting Israeli offensive which killed over 1,200 Palestinians, says Walid Al-Mudallal, a professor at Gaza Islamic University, a Hamas bastion.”We can’t say that Hamas’s structure as a movement has been destroyed or even affected,” he said.”It will not disappear because it is a secret resistance movement. Hamas is a movement that knows how to renew and rebuild itself easily,” he said.On the international stage, it has benefited from the war’s exposure of the deep rift in the Arab world between U.S. and Iranian allies.Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority (PA) immediately called for a ceasefire while their rivals Iran and Syria, backers of Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, loudly championed the struggle against the Jewish state.On Friday Hamas received a huge political boost when its leaders for the first time attended a top-level Arab summit in Doha that was boycotted by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Abbas.Hamas “is coming out of this war with huge political gains,” said Naji Sharab, a political science professor at the al-Azhar university, traditionally close to Abbas’s Fatah movement.“It reaffirmed its position as a major actor not only in the region but in the world,” he said. “On the Palestinian scene, it has succeeded in embodying the resistance during more than 20 days.”

Read Friday’s column, “Israel’s Gift to Hamas,” to see how the Israeli ceasefire will prove to be a victory for Hamas—and Iran—and how it will use this to press its advantage in the West Bank.