Will this Israel-Hamas de-escalation continue?

Barak Ravid and Amos Harel of Haaretz tell us that PA President Mahmoud Abbas told al-Arabiyya t.v. that

Hamas has asked Israel to refrain from killing its leaders, and the leaders of militant movement Islamic Jihad. Abbas said “I think that Israel has agreed or will soon agree.” He added that the details of the agreement will likely emerge in the coming days.

I couldn’t find it on Arabiyya’s English-language site and didn’t have time to look on their Arabic-language site.
All the reporting I’m seeing today (read below) indicates that:

(1) There has been a notable lull in the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas;
(2) The Israel-Hamas negotiations currently being mediated by Egypt, that I wrote about in depth here on Saturday, are now very serious indeed; and the present lull may well be designed– by the relevant actors on all sides– to give them the maximum chance to succeed; and
(3) The desire for revenge stirred up in some quarters in Israel by last week’s killings in the Mercaz Harav yeshiva may well have been deflected by Olmert away from Gaza and into the announcement of a couple of new settlement-construction projects in the occupied West Bank.

It is worth noting, too, that as Husni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt acts in this matter it is acutely aware of the rising pressure it faces from its own, very strongly pro-Hamas citizenry.
AP reports from Jerusalem today that officials there say that PM Olmert,

has instructed the army to scale back airstrikes and raids into the Gaza Strip in response to a recent drop in rocket fire from the territory…
Israeli defense officials and the Hamas rulers of Gaza said there was no formal truce in place. But the officials in Olmert’s office said the prime minister had ordered the army to rein in its operations to allow Egypt to proceed in mediation talks.

This is an intriguing follow-up to what I was reporting here on Saturday, namely that the Egypt-mediate Israel-Hamas negotiation seemed to be making serious progress.
Haaretz’s Ravid and Harel write this:

Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that Israel would continue to operate against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
“The fighting is ongoing and will continue and will at times increase and decrease,” he said.
“There is not at this point any agreement,” Barak said. “But if today people go to school in Ashkelon without Grad-type [rockets], or sit in Sderot and Sapir College without Qassams, I wouldn’t propose complaining about any quiet day, but at any moment in which we need to act, we will.”
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri also said Monday that no comprehensive cease-fire had been reached. Hamas officials said their leaders would, however, continue Egyptian-led efforts to secure a truce.
The government recently ordered the IDF to exercise restraint in operations in the Gaza Strip, pursuant to what a senior government official termed new rules of the game forged in the aftermath of last week’s military operation in Gaza.

A separate piece in Haaretz, co-written by Harel and Ami Issacharoff, gives details of the decline in Gaza-sourced rocketings of southern Israel in recent days, though they concluded this didn’t seem to have been the result of a specific agreement between Israel and Hamas. They wrote:

At its peak, on February 29, some 50 rockets were fired each day, mostly by Hamas militants. In the middle of last week, the rate dropped to 10-15 rockets per day, fired by more extremist groups – but the Qassams were provided to them mostly by Hamas. Since last Friday, one or two rockets have been fired each day.

As for the Hamas-linked Palestine Information Center, yesterday it reported from Cairo that,

Egyptian diplomatic sources have revealed that a comprehensive plan for calm, ending siege and opening crossings in the Gaza Strip was ready with international approval but still facing difficulties.
The sources … added that the Americans as well as the Europeans were supportive of the Egyptian efforts.
They explained that the mediation bid targets achieving calm, lifting the siege, solving inter-Palestinian problems and resuming negotiations.

Today the PIC reported from Damascus that “Mohamed Nasr, a member of the Hamas political bureau, categorically denied that his Movement had reached an agreement on a truce with the Israeli occupation through Egypt.” But Nasr also said that the negotiations in Egypt were ongoing.
If the present “lull” can indeed be hardened into a formally agreed– and hopefully also credibly monitored— ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that will be excellent news: for the Palestinians, for the Israelis, and for the prospects of a much broader calming of tensions throughout the whole region.
In the context of such a calming, everyone concerned about the region’s wellbeing can proceed with due haste to the broader kinds of negotiation that were urged by the Iraq Study Group: one on the terms of (and context for) the US withdrawal from Iraq, and the other on a sustainable and comprehensive final Arab-Israeli peace agreement on all outstanding tracks.
Neither of those two broader negotiations can even start to be addressed so long as the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas continues, and so long as Israel maintains its completely inhumane siege of Gaza. Therefore let’s hope the most recent de-escalation continues, accelerates, and deepens.