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It certainly looks like the truce was working for four months. What happened? Israel continued to assassinate Hamas leaders, and then engaged in a bloody operation in Gaza. As reported in the US News and World Report:

The six-month cease-fire started coming apart at the beginning of November after Israeli commandos killed a team of Hamas fighters during a raid on a tunnel they suspected was being dug for the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. That raid set off more Palestinian rocketing, which prompted further Israeli attacks. All this prompted Hamas to declare that it wouldn't extend the cease-fire unless Israel lifted its punishing siege of the Gaza Strip, which was imposed after the militant group Hamas was elected to power nearly three years ago.

[Note: the graphic above is from War in Context, and I found it by looking at Gaza Siege. You can learn more about Israel's effort to rewrite recent history by following those links.]

The point is, there is a long history of broken truces, and Israel is responsible for some of those, including the most recent one. Hamas proved itself able to end the rocket fire, and demanded that Israel live up to it the terms of the agreement - to end the crippling seige of Gaza that was leading to starvation and the breakdown of basic infrastructure. Israel not only refused to end the siege, it provoked violence with fresh attacks in Gaza.

Does this mean Hamas is clean as the driven snow? Of course not. But it does mean that the justification of Israel's invasion of Gaza - that it was a defensive measure taken as a last resort to end the rocket attacks - is false. Israel had the option of living up to the truce and honoring the democratic choice of the Palestinian people.

[And for the duration of the crisis, here is the obligatory denunciation of terrorism, which we offer as a pre-emptive strike against those who claim this site is supporting Hamas violence: Hear ye, hear ye, Peace in the Middle East, a change.org activist site, hereby declares our opposition to lobbing rockets and bombs on innocent civilians, be they fired by Hamas or Israel, aimed well or not, during open warfare and during truces, and without accepting the hollow excuse that dead civilians are somehow more acceptable when killed by mistake.]