It just seems crazy to me given the power imbalance. A cynical part of me suspects that things are playing out exactly as some evil strategists hoped they would, which, given all the children dying, is super-depressing.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Since Iran is standing in the background, we have no idea how many Shahed drones are standing by when they come in.
Hamas simply wants as many civilian casualties as possible. Then they’ll blame Israel and unfortunately a lot of people will buy into that, see the latest idiocy by Fridays for Future.
As always, motives vary heavily. I think many people have raised great points, and no doubt many of them are accurate enough.
It’s the same for Israel, too, right? I would imagine a two state solution is the only reasonable exit strategy, and Israel could make that happen overnight, but they haven’t. Why? Again, motives vary heavily.
Israel proposed/accepted/was in favor of two state solution multiple times throughout history. It was Palestinians who rejected it.
I’m sorry but this is simply not correct. Some people in the Israeli government in the past have agreed to a 2-state solution, but extremist Israelis kept revolting. Yitzhak Rabim was literally assassinated by an extremist Israeli for signing and supporting the Oslo accords.
Most Israelis and Arabs recognize the need for a 2 state solution, but the Israeli government is not on board right now. And whoever makes any kind of moves in that direction gets pushed out pretty quickly.
It’s an hypothesis only.
But I think the important matter were the foreign ostages, especially from Europe and USA, because those countries do a lot to recover them, including paying big money.
I wondered why Israel didn’t attack the weekend they said they would attack. They gave an ultimatum, but didn’t act on it. One possibility is that the USA and Europe wanted to try to recover their ostages first.
When did the US pay big money to a terrorist organization to release hostages?
The US never negotiates with “terrorists”, they fund “freedom fighters” to kill the terrorists and maybe recover some of the hostages.
Hamas likely wanted to force a confrontation in order to make it abundantly clear who’s paying for which “freedom fighters”… even if everyone knew for a long time, did very little about it, and is likely to do very little more either way.
This is just my opinion but, given terrorist organisations are militarily usually much poorer/smaller/weaker than the group they stand against, they need help from outside.
One way to possibly achieve that is to do something awful to provoke your opposition into a retaliation so indiscriminate and horrifying that your ideological (if not literal) allies in the surrounding area step in to attack your enemy.
