As the clock ticks down to Barack Obama's inauguration, the US president-elect has kept silent on the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its latest deadly turn in the Gaza Strip.
Obama transition officials have ventured little more than saying their boss is "monitoring" the situation in Gaza, where at least 460 people have been killed in eight days of air raids before a ground offensive began Saturday.
In the same period, Gaza militant rockets have killed four Israelis and wounded several dozen people.
"The president-elect is closely monitoring global events, including the situation in Gaza," his national security spokeswoman Brooke Anderson said in a statement after the ground assault got underway.
But she offered no further comment on the violence in Gaza and used a phrase repeated often by Obama and his aides: "There is one president at a time and we intend to respect that."
Senior advisor David Axelrod said Sunday that Obama is "committed" to achieving peace in the Middle East, in the only extended comments from the president-elect's team so far.
"Obviously, this situation has become even more complicated in the last couple of days and weeks... But it's something that he's committed to," Axelrod told CBS television.
Obama transition team officials told AFP the president-elect would not comment publicly in the coming days on the Gaza offensive, and the future president will likely keep silent on the issue until his January 20 inauguration.
His muted response has already drawn the anger of some in the Middle East.
"The start is not good," said Khaled Meshaal, leader of the Hamas Islamist movement that has ruled Gaza since June 2007.
"You commented on Mumbai but you say nothing about the crime of the enemy (Israel). This policy of double standards should stop."
Obama will be hard pressed to address the conflict, the worst in the region since the summer 2006 war in Lebanon and the latest addition to the growing list of foreign policy crises on his agenda.
Israel launched its December 27 assault in response to a wave of Palestinian-fired rockets from the territory which has been under tight Israeli blockade for 18 months.
The crisis "accelerates the timetable for any Obama engagement. It forces their hands. They are going to have to do crisis management," said Tamara Wittes, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Obama's options are also limited by Israeli elections, set for February 10, that could return hawkish former premier Benjamin Netanyahu to power.
In a July interview with The New York Times, Obama said he did not think that "any country would find it acceptable to have missiles raining down on the heads of their citizens.
"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 said. "And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."
As for talking with Hamas, Obama told the Times that it was "very hard to negotiate with a group that is not representative of a nation state, does not recognize your right to exist, has consistently used terror as a weapon, and is deeply influenced by other countries."
But Obama is also set to benefit from a positive reception in the Middle East, where his election fueled hopes for change in US foreign policy in the region, seen as tilted toward Israel and US-backed Arab regimes in countries such as Egypt and Jordan.
Hillary Clinton, Obama's incoming secretary of state pending Senate confirmation, staunchly supported Israel during her tenure as senator from New York, which has a large Jewish constituency.
"The next president must be ready to say to the world: America's position is unchanging, our resolve unyielding, our stance non-negotiable," Clinton told the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC in June.
Outgoing President George W. Bush's efforts to relaunch Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Annapolis, Maryland in November 2007, after a seven-year hiatus, failed to produce a hoped-for peace deal by the end of 2008.
Some analysts have pressed Obama to tackle Middle East peace early on in his administration, whereas most US presidents have addressed the issue more aggressively only later in their tenure.
"By now it should be quite evident that the two parties to the conflict will never reach an agreement on their own," Zbigniew Brzezinski, an Obama supporter and national security advisor under president Jimmy Carter, told the Huffington Post news website.
"The only way, therefore, to move forward is for the international community, led by the United States, to put on the table the framework of an eventual agreement."
Axelrod hinted how Obama would engage in the peace process.
"He is going to work closely with the Israelis. They're a great ally of ours, the most important ally in the region. And that is a fundamental principle from which he'll work," Axelrod said.
"But he will do so in a way that will promote the cause of peace, and work closely with the Israelis and the Palestinians on that -- toward that objective."
