Amid the rumbling of tanks, roaring of warplanes and thundering of blasts, Israelis and Palestinians hobbled into the year of 2009, with their horns more tightly locked in the decades-old feud.

As the year rolled on, two of the three central parties in the Mideast peace process came up with new faces.

Yet the fresh trio, featuring a hawkish Israeli premier and a moderate Palestinian president alongside an eager but busy White House host, made little headway through the myriad of thorny issues, particularly settlements and East Jerusalem.

After all the blood-shedding, self-defensing and finger-pointing, the year ended just as it augured at the very beginning. Where one could find the last drop of the waning cheer is that the finale was better than the prelude and that the year of 2010 could probably set its foot on the volatile land in a less loud way.

Bloody begining

On the last Sabbath of 2008, four days before the New Year's Day of 2009, Israel caught the Palestinians and even the whole international community flatfooted with an airborne blitz upon the Gaza Strip.

The assaults turned out to be a 22-day massive offensive against the Palestinian enclave, virtually controlled by the militant Hamas movement, an Islamic resistance group blacklisted by Israel as a terrorist organization.

Over 1,300 Gazans, including hundreds of civilians, were killed during the operation, which also left 13 Israelis dead.

The Israeli government, then under former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, tagged the warfare as self-defense, claiming that it was launched in response to eight years of continuous rocket fire from Gaza and in order to restore calm and security to its southern land.

However, in view of such huge casualties, the muscle-flexing drew vocal condemnations from across the world, especially Arab nations, with many accusing the upper-handed Jewish state of applying excessive force and triggering a humanitarian crisis among the 1.5 million population crowding in the coastal strip of about 360 square kilometers.

As the internationally recognized administrative establishment for the Palestinian territories, including the Gaza Strip, the West Bank-based Palestinian National Authority (PNA), dominated by President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah Party, harshly condemned the Israeli aggression and officially suspended peace talks with the Jewish state.

The breakdown dealt another blow to the formidable peace process between the two neighbors, which had just been resumed in late 2007 at a US-sponsored international conference in Annapolis after a seven-year hiatus.

And the ambitious Annapolis goal, namely to reach a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace deal before then US President George W. Bush left office in January 2009, has already gone with the wind.

Rightward shift

If the Gaza operation, as seen by many analysts, was a desperate attempt by Israel's then relatively dovish ruling coalition, led by the centrist Kadima Party, to garner domestic support ahead of the February elections, then it failed to deliver.

The traditionally hardline Likud Party defeated its main rival, Kadima, by a waffle-thin margin, in the parliamentary elections on February 10.

Likud finally succeeded in piecing together a ruling alliance, sending its chairman Benjamin Netanyahu to the Prime Minister's Office for the second time 10 years after his first term.

The emergence of the Netanyahu administration marked a notable rightward turn of the Israeli leadership and gave rise to new concerns about the already unwieldy peace process, as an absolute majority in the new coalition is Netanyahu's natural allies -- right-wing parties that have been uncompromising in the peace talks.

Brushing away the mounting pessimism, Netanyahu repeatedly stressed his government's commitment to regional peace.

In a landmark diplomatic policy speech in June, he publicly voiced, for the first time, his support for the two-state principle in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He said that his country is willing to accept a demilitarized Palestinian state by its side, and urged the PNA to resume peace talks without any preconditions.

Yet citing Netanyahu's refusal to negotiate on the status of Jerusalem and the return of Palestinian refugees, Palestinian officials denounced his gestures as a slap in the face of moderate Palestinians, charging that his remarks amounted to unilaterally ending the negotiations and taking the possibility of peace talks off the table.