But Israel voiced a nearly unanimous agreement that the punishing military offensive in Gaza was the right thing to do.

Now as the real votes are counted in Israel’s national parliamentary election, it’s results are more mixed and more nuanced.

Until a government is formed, it’s hard to see what this pivotal election will mean for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the struggle to reassemble a peace process that lies buried under the rubble in Gaza.

It looks like the current Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is ahead in the early returns.

But it remained very unclear as to whether Livini’s party would have enough seats in the Knesset to put together a government. And most analysts put their money on the hawkish Binyamin Netanyahu as the candidate most likely to build the coalition that will land him back in the Prime Minister’s office.

The king maker in all this might well be the far-right Israeli nationalist and former minister Avigdor Liberman who is widely viewed among Israeli Arabs and many left leaning Israeli Jews as a seething anti-Arab racist.

Nadav Tamir, the Israeli Consul General for New England, came by GlobalPost headquarters here in Boston today and we spent the late morning discussing the election and what it all means. Tamir is a wise observer and a very skilled diplomat who avoids talking the raw math of politics. But he offered these observations:

“Right now the fear in Israel is very real … Israelis saw that incremental steps in the peace process did not work. They saw that a bold approach only created the intifada. A unilateral pullout from Gaza also failed. … So there is fear of what to do next. And when there is fear, Israel usually turns to the right,” he said.

“Eighty percent of Israelis see a two state solution as the only way to go in the future,” he said. “But the problem is they don’t know how to get there. As Shimon Peres said recently, “There is light at the end, but there is no tunnel.”

GlobalPost’s Egypt correspondent, Theo May, finally landed inside Gaza. Using his Blackberry to file because he couldn’t get any internet connection through his laptop, he has just filed a riveting account of what it feels like on the ground tonight under the Israeli air strikes.

Getting inside Gaza makes him one of the few Western reporters who has managed to get on the ground to document the devastation and the killing that has gone on during three weeks of an Israeli offensive. Many Palestinian reporters and photographers have been the only ones documenting the conflict. The Israelis have blocked the Western media from going inside Gaza. But Theo was able to enter from the Egyptian side of the border at Rafah.

Gaza is controlled by Hamas, the Islamic militant group that broke the ceasefire and began rocketing southern Israel. Israeli officials say those Hamas rocket attacks provoked their overwhelming display of force which has killed more than 1,100 Palestinians, including hundreds of civilians. Theo is now in a place to be our witness on the ground and he will be bringing you his live reports from the field all weekend.

We have also put together a photo gallery of Reuters images from the Israeli offensive. The images show the massive destruction and the horrific suffering of the Palestinians under this offensive. It also shows the Israeli military carrying out what it believes is a necessary offensive to put an end to the Hamas attacks on its civilians. Some of the images are disturbing. But then again so is war.

We are live!

It’s the end of the first day and it’s grown quiet again here at GlobalPost headquarters here in Boston after a day of hard work and some celebration. There are sticky Champagne stains on the conference table where we have our news meetings. Just a great day to see the site come alive. All that hard work by our correspondents in the field and our editors here in Boston came together to give rise to a new voice in international reporting. And this is the first minute I have had time to post.

The feedback has been positive. I did an interview which aired today on NPR’s Here and Now. Co-founder and CEO Phil Balboni and I were guests on the Emily Rooney show “Greater Boston” out of WGBH in Boston. We also had The New Republic in our office for most of the morning observing our first day. We had a story on TechCrunch that was favorable and generated a lot of buzz.

We really want to hear your comments so please keep them coming.

I hope you had a chance to read the exclusive story we offer today on Mugage by our own Senior Editor Andrew Meldrum who lived in and covered Zimbabwe for most of the last 25 years. His story documents a mounting case against Mugabe for a war crimes tribunal. And Andrew will be following the story up tomorrow so stay tuned.

Also, hope you had a chance to read our Jerusalem correspondent Matt Rees on the situation in Gaza and see the kind of narrative reporting he brings to a hard news daily story in southern Israel where Israeli bomb sappers can pick up the shrapnel from Hamas rockets, but they can’t take away the fear. From the other side of Gaza at the Egyptian checkpoint, take a look at Theo May’s gripping account of the Palestinian wounded who are being rushed across the border for medical treatment.

These stories are all promoted on the home page but they are also archived on the country page and on the correspondents’ bio page. You can get to the bio pages by clicking on a correspondent’s byline or photo or by going to the navigation bar and clicking on correspondents. On these correspondent bio pages you will also have access to their “reporter’s notebooks,” which are essentially reporting blogs. There is lots of great stuff in every corner of the site. We invite you to keep checking it out and keep sending the feedback.