Cairo: Arab governments have weathered 10 days of public outrage at their passive response to the Israeli assault on Gaza and can easily survive as long as the Israeli operation takes, political analysts said.

Although hatred of Israel and sympathy for the Gaza Palestinians are widespread, only a minority of Islamists and other political activists are willing to come out on the streets and risk abuse at the hands of state security agents. The governments have plenty of experience handling public anger.

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Israeli attempt to defeat Hezbollah in south Lebanon in 2006 are the two most recent examples of operations which brought Arabs out on the streets demanding that their governments take a stand.

In both cases Arab public opinion carried little weight with US, Israeli or Arab policymakers, despite dire warnings that Arab governments friendly with Washington might be in danger.

In the current conflict Arab leaders can sleep even sounder because they have had some success with their campaigns to discredit Hamas, which is bearing the brunt of the Israeli assault.

"More than half of the public accept the Egyptian idea that Hamas was irresponsible and was irrational ... They are not going to fight, or take a stance against Egypt or Saudi Arabia," said Sateh Nour Al Deen, columnist at the Lebanese newspaper Al Safir.

"The Arab public is outraged [at] the killings of children and women, old men, but other than that ... they are not interested in the future of Hamas," he said. Walid Kazziha, professor of political science at the American University in Cairo, said the Egyptian government had made some progress in its aggressive defence of its position on the Gaza conflict and its appeals to nationalist sentiments.

"They have been successful in turning public opinion against Hamas by invoking Egyptian nationalism," Kazziha said.

Issandr Al Amrani, Egypt and North Africa analyst at the International Crisis Group, said Egyptian public opinion on the Gaza conflict was much more divided than in 2006 when Israel was fighting Hezbollah, which won broad public support.

"For a start there has been a media campaign against Hamas for what it did in 2007 (when it drove rival Fatah forces out of Gaza). The second thing is that to a lot of Egyptians the idea of Hamas being a fundamental threat makes sense," he added.

In Cairo, a city of more than 15 million people, the largest gathering against Israel's Gaza operation has not drawn more than a few thousand, less than protests in some Western capitals.

"The security services are trying to prevent any major organisation [of protests], and also the group that can mobilise the most people, the Muslim Brotherhood, is willing to avoid all-out confrontation," Al Amrani said.

Shiites in eastern Saudi Arabia said they held a protest last week that police broke up, while the government denied it took place.