FACTBOX - U.S. responses to Israel's Gaza attacks

Obama's team has avoided policy statements while George W. Bush is in power. Adviser David Axelrod said on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday: "There's only one president who can speak for America at a time. And that president now is George Bush."

Bush's secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, spoke to Obama by phone. "They have a good working relationship," Axelrod told the news program. "The calls are largely in the area of fact-finding for him."

WHAT MIGHT OBAMA DO?

In the CBS interview, Axelrod recalled that when then-candidate Obama was in the southern Israeli town of Sderot in July, he voiced understanding for Israel's urge to try to put an end to attacks on Sderot from Gaza.

On the broader issue of Middle East peace, Obama promised to engage in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking from the start but has yet to propose a policy shift that might rescue a two-state solution from oblivion.

"My goal is to make sure that we work, starting from the minute I'm sworn into office, to try to find some breakthroughs," Obama said in July. But he added it was unrealistic to expect him to "suddenly snap his fingers and bring about peace."

WHAT ELSE FACTORS INTO PEACE MOVES?

Like Bush, Israel's leader Ehud Olmert is a lame duck. In October, Olmert proposed Israel withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank in return for peace with Palestinians. Israel holds a general election on February 10 that will chart peace moves.

Israel's expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, along with a thickening network of settler roads, checkpoints and barriers, have complicated prospects for a two-state solution.