It is fairly safe to assume that the way US Secretary of State John Kerry is handling the crisis in Gaza will not earn him the Nobel Peace Prize. Not really because he preferred to follow the Turkey-Qatar axis over the Egypt-Saudi Arabia axis.

His failure is far worse than that. When he chanced into an opportunity to convert the military dead end into leverage for a diplomatic breakthrough, the US secretary of state got stuck in the Middle Eastern quagmire like some new recruit.

Instead of bolstering the status of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as the key to resolving the conflict, Kerry played into the hands of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who would prefer to manage the conflict. Kerry failed to realize that Israel’s prime minister has gotten himself caught by what the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel diagnosed over two centuries ago as the “powerlessness of the victor.” That powerlessness is written on the walls belonging to each ruined house in Gaza, where dozens of defenseless civilians lie buried beneath the rubble. And it is written in the 56 death announcements of Israeli fallen soldiers that appeared on homes and streets throughout Israel.

Even after three weeks of bombing, more than 1,000 casualties and about 400,000 displaced people, Hamas is still firing rockets directly into the heart of Israel. The country’s political and security leadership have come to realize that a military solution would necessitate retaking the entire Gaza Strip. But that would also mean assuming responsibility for the well-being of 1.8 million poor and unemployed Palestinians, who are physically and emotionally vulnerable.