Both sides claimed victory but it is clear neither has won – Hamas has not disarmed, it still has rockets it can fire into Israel that now reach as far as Jerusalem, while Israel has not lifted its siege on Gaza that has imprisoned the coastal enclave in an ever-deepening humanitarian crisis.

It is a situation as unsustainable now as it was after the wars of 2008/2009 and 2012.

The equation has not changed – maintaining the status quo in Gaza and the West Bank and achieving lasting peace between Israel and Palestine continue to be mutually exclusive.

And in the meantime, so much blood has been spilled.

In 50 days of war more than 2100 Palestinians were killed, most of them, human rights groups say, were civilians, including about 500 children.

At least 11,000 people were injured and preliminary UN estimates indicate up to 1000 of the injured children will have a permanent disability.

At least 1500 Palestinian children have been orphaned by the war and 373,000 kids require direct and specialised psychosocial support, the UN says.

More than 17,000 homes have been destroyed or badly damaged and more than a quarter of Gaza's population – at least 475,000 people – are displaced and living in makeshift UN shelters.

In some streets there is not a house left standing.

The Israel Defence Forces also sustained heavy losses – 64 soldiers died in its ground invasion of Gaza – while six civilians including a four-year-old boy were also killed.

Life for thousands in the south of Israel near the Gaza border was thrown into chaos, with families forced to relocate to safer areas during the seven weeks of war, while Israel's main airport closed several times due to rocket fire.

Tourism executives estimated their losses amounted to 2 billion shekels ($60 million) so far, with many hotels reporting a 24 per cent drop in overnight stays, Haaretz reported.

The northern summer of 2014 has been lost on both sides of the border.

By the end of the fighting, militants in Gaza had fired 4564 rockets and mortars at Israel, the IDF says, with more than 3600 exploding in Israeli territory, 224 in built-up areas. Israel's missile defence system, known as "Iron Dome" intercepted 735 rockets.

The Israel Air Force bombed more than 5200 targets in Gaza, the IDF says, while its ground and naval assault in some civilian areas was so ferocious it reportedly left senior US military officers "stunned".

In the attack that levelled the Gaza City neighbourhood of Shujaiyah, 11 Israeli artillery battalions bombarded the town with at least 7000 high explosive shells, Al-Jazeera reported this week, sourcing the information to senior US military sources.

"The only possible reason for doing that is to kill a lot of people in as short a period of time as possible," the senior US military officer told Al-Jazeera. "It's not mowing the lawn," he said, referring to an Israeli military expression that describes its incursions against Hamas in Gaza. "It's removing the topsoil."

The shockingly high civilian death toll in Gaza and the far-reaching devastation also widened fault lines through prominent Jewish communities outside Israel.

In an open letter published in The New York Times, 327 Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors of the Holocaust unequivocally condemned "the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonisation of historic Palestine".

Describing a "wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of more than 2000 Palestinians, including many hundreds of children", the letter stated: "Nothing can justify bombing UN shelters, homes, hospitals and universities. Nothing can justify depriving people of electricity and water."

Genocide begins with the silence of the world, the letter writers warned.

"We are alarmed by the extreme, racist dehumanisation of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch."

In turn, the signatories themselves were bombarded with hate mail by Israel's supporters in a wave of furious condemnation on social media.

But the criticisms of Israel's actions didn't end there.

The former US special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Martin Indyk, warns the Gaza war had "a very negative impact" on US-Israel relations, signalling a broader fall in support for Israel.

"There's a lot of strain in the relationship now. The personal relationship between the president and the prime minister has been fraught for some time and it's become more complicated by recent events," Indyk notes in an interview with Foreign Policy journal this week.

At times, he says, US President Barack Obama was "enraged" at Israel, not just over its actions in Gaza but also for its consistently hostile treatment of US Secretary of State John Kerry, who had been pushing a renewed effort to end the decades-long Israel-Palestine conflict.

He was particularly critical of unnamed Israeli officials who described Kerry as launching "a strategic terror attack" against Israel.

"That was just outrageous and it enraged the president," Indyk says.

He warned of a shift in support for Israel, pointing to a Pew poll that showed younger people and Democrats professing less support for Israel, while Republicans maintained their long-term strong support.

"If those trends continue – and I think they are likely to have been exacerbated by the Gaza crisis, with all the ethical questions that has raised – then over time Israel may find itself in a very different situation than it's gotten used to," Indyk warns.

Back home, Israelis reverted to their "Fortress Israel" mentality, says Tel Aviv-based public opinion analyst and academic Dahlia Scheindlin.

"They think 'everybody is against us, Hamas wants to kill us and annihilate us, we might have al-Qaeda on our northern border … we are completely isolated and under attack in the global political environment'."

People know, she says, that Prime Minister Netanyahu is "really out of sorts with the Western world".

"Israelis are highly aware that they have basically lost Europe in terms of public opinion," Scheindlin says. "The US is the last bulwark against major condemnation and sanctions and that support is slipping."

Just over half of all respondents in a poll published in the left-leaning Haaretz on Thursday said there was no winner in the Gaza war, 26 per cent said Israel won, 16 per cent said Hamas won and 4 per cent said they did not know.

"There is a general feeling of hopelessness that the world will never understand our side of the story," Scheindlin says, combined with a "tacit agreement between the government and the public that the status quo is sustainable."

But, she warns, Israelis are also despairing about not reaching a final status agreement with Palestine – polls consistently show the majority still want an agreement, they just have no hope of one ever being finalised.

"There is an expectation that there will be more rocket fire, that there will be a war every two years, along with the increasing pressure of the boycott movement and deepening problems with the US," she says.

"This could lead some to change their minds about whether there is some urgency of reaching a final status agreement with Palestinians … but just think of how much destruction and death had to happen for a rise of a few percentage points regarding urgency."

In Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's first statement following Tuesday's ceasefire he declared it a major military and diplomatic victory and reiterated his goal to "demilitarise" Hamas and Gaza.

"Hamas was hit hard and it did not receive even a single one of the conditions that it set for a ceasefire, not even one," the prime minister said.

"I think that we also instilled in the international community the fact that Hamas, ISIS and al-Qaeda and other extremist Islamic terrorist organisations are members of the same family."

The IDF has repeatedly said it did not target civilians in this war, instead it claims Hamas turned Palestinian civilians into human shields by intentionally operating "in and adjacent to civilian areas, including in kindergartens, hospitals and mosques".

Hamas, in turn, was equally triumphant. The leader of its political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, said Palestinian unity had been strengthened by the war and that Hamas and other armed factions would not disarm.

"When Israel failed in its siege of Gaza they chose to destroy it, but it is the duty of the unity government and the world to rebuild it," he said referring to the united Palestinian government – the first in seven years – that was formed in June and was strongly condemned by Israel.

But as in Israel, the mood on the ground in Gaza was more circumspect. So much bloodshed and yet the blockade is still not lifted beyond a token expansion of fishing zones off its polluted coastline.

Economist Omar Shaban is bleak about Gaza's prospects if the blockade – which severely restricts the movement of goods and people in and out of the strip – is not lifted.

"Any lasting ceasefire must include the removal of the siege and allowing construction material to enter Gaza via the Palestinian Authority and the international community," Shaban says.

"We must create economic activity so that people who have lost everything in this war can work on the reconstruction and earn money – this will allow them to think about the future so they do not sit there in the rubble of their houses and think about revenge."

The majority of Palestinians want to live and work in peace, he says.

"Palestinians in Gaza voted for Hamas in 2006, we did not vote for this war," Shaban says.

The Gaza-based economist, who has long been deeply involved in the debate about a two-state solution, says that conversation no longer happens in Israel.

"When they built the wall they stopped seeing us and now we are not a priority for them."

There has already been three wars in just under seven years, he warns.

In 2006 the rockets reached 20 kilometres, in 2007-8 they reached 40 kilometres, in 2012 they reached 80 kilometres and in 2014 they reached 110 kilometres.

"If we do not solve this problem now by 2016 the rockets will go even further – Israel must realise, this is not just about Hamas, it is about jobs, health, education for Palestinians who want to be able to work and move freely in and out of their own state."

The flaw in this ceasefire deal, one that mirrors the other truces that have been made and eventually broken after each of the three Gaza wars, is its vagueness and lack of any implementation mechanism, says Noura Erekat, an adjunct professor at the Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies at the Washington-based Georgetown University.

"What the parties agreed upon right now reflects what they agreed on in 2012," she says. "The tragedy of it all is that all of this suffering, the destruction of Gaza and the loss of more than 2000 Palestinian lives was unnecessary if it was all for the same deal that was done two years ago."

"This is just a holding position, it is not the resolution to the conflict, and given how deliberately de-developed Gaza already is this level of destruction makes survival even more difficult."

Indeed the United Nations agency that has overseen much of the rebuilding work from the last two Gaza wars describes Gaza's situation as "devastating".

Only a fraction of the pledges to rebuild from the last war in November 2012 have been delivered, says the United Nations Development Program special representative of the Administrator in the occupied Palestinian Territory, Frode Mauring,

Of the $US5 billion ($5.3b)that was pledged, just $US1b has been delivered.

"One of the problems has been bringing materials into Gaza – we hope that the conference that is likely to come in the aftermath of this conflict will bring adequate numbers ... and that the pledges are both honoured and possible to implement," Mauringsays.

A bridge crossing Wadi Gaza that was badly damaged in Operation Pillar of Defence in 2012 is still yet to be repaired, Mauring says, due to a lack of funding.

"It is the third time that bridge was destroyed so I guess that has made it somewhat less attractive to donors."

Mauring says it is vital the siege of Gaza is lifted by Israel and Egypt to "restore the dignity of the Palestinian people, who want to be able to have jobs and to not be the recipient of humanitarian aid".

"This has to be addressed in a way that allows Israel to feel secure about opening the borders and satisfies the needs in Gaza."

In the meantime, the destruction is so widespread that development experts say it could take up to 10 years to rebuild some of Gaza's key infrastructure, including power plants, sewage systems, water pumping stations, as well as schools, hospitals and factories.

Thousands of hectares of farmland, along with thousands of head of cattle, sheep and goats, have also been lost.

Electricity shortages stretch to 16-18 hours aday in most areas and there is a critical shortage of clean drinking water.

"The entire population of Gaza has been affected by the conflict," the UN warns,  "and almost all need food and other assistance to recover."