Analysis: flare-up regarded by some as example of domestic politics driving violent escalation

As a ceasefire begins between Israel and Palestinian fighters in Gaza, the longtime foes are poised to turn their attention away from military action and on to constructing competing narratives of victory.

Already, the groundwork is being laid. Unnamed Israeli defence officials are being quoted in local media as saying they are satisfied with the damage inflicted. And a militant source in Gaza said: “For us, the battle achieved its goals.”

Children in their early teens have lived through four wars, with the fear, loss and trauma that brings

Her hair is matted with rubble dust. Bare feet poke out from pink tracksuit bottoms. Blood from a head wound streaks over her eye and down her face.

But Suzy Eshkuntana is alive, pulled out of the rubble of her family’s home seven hours after it was hit in an Israeli airstrike in the middle of the night. Her four siblings and her mother were killed.

The Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent Oliver Holmes examines the series of combustible events that coincided to trigger the worst violence in Israel and Gaza since 2014

• Israel-Gaza conflict: 200 Palestinians killed in a week, say officials
  
• Who’s to blame for reigniting the Israel-Palestine conflict? | Simon Tisdall

Serious clashes erupted in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank on Tuesday as Palestinians took part in a day of protests and strikes over Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. In Jerusalem, police deployed water cannon in the neighbourhood Sheikh Jarrah, where Palestinian families are facing eviction from homes they have lived in since the 1950s.

• Clashes in Jerusalem and West Bank amid protests and strikes
  

Areas that have escaped worst of bombing in previous conflicts are bearing brunt this time around

For the residents of the central neighbourhoods of Gaza City the last nine days have been unusually brutal.

The affluent heart of Gaza’s Palestinian society, in past conflicts areas like Tal al-Hawa and al-Rimal have been less heavily hit by the periodic wars between Israel and Hamas that have shaken the coastal strip since 2008.

A six-year-old Palestinian girl was found deep inside a pile of rubble after her home was destroyed by an Israeli strike in Gaza that killed her mother and all four of her siblings.

Suzy Eshkuntana, trapped for seven hours under the debris, was reunited in Shifa hospital with her father, who was also being treated for his wounds. The family’s home was hit by Israeli air strikes early on Sunday in Gaza City, a wave of attacks that Gaza health officials said killed 42 people including 10 children and raised the death toll in Gaza after a week of bombardment to more than 200.

Israel says it is attacking the militant Islamist Hamas movement that controls the densely populated Gaza Strip and that - along with Islamic Jihad and other militant groups - has fired more than 3,000 rockets towards Israeli towns and cities, killing 10 people, including two children

• ‘Massive destruction’: Gaza’s hospitals under strain after Israeli strikes
  

Deaths of doctors have further hit medical services struggling with damaged facilities and medicine shortages

In her bed in Gaza City’s Shifa hospital, 25-year-old Aya Aloul recalls the moment her 66-year-old father, Moeen, one of Gaza’s few neurologists, was killed in an Israeli strike, one of two key Palestinian medical staff killed within hours on Sunday.

Covered in wounds and bruises caused by shrapnel and falling masonry, she described the bombing of the family’s home in the Rimal neighbourhood. “I get scared,” Aya told the Guardian on Monday, “so, since the war began, I’ve slept next to my parents’ bed, putting a mattress on the floor.