Yes: Israel did exactly what Hamas expected. The problem for Hamas is twofold:

* Hamas thought the urban combat to root them out of Gaza City and Khan Younis would be a Vietnam-scale bloodbath that would tie the IDF up indefinitely until they were forced to make a truce.

* Hamas's messianic nutbag leader genuinely believed that he was ushering in the end of days, and that the IRGC's other assets would immediately commit to full scale combat operations against the IDF. Instead: Hezbollah noped the hell out, and Iran launched a large scale drone attack that ended up providing a Boeing and Lockheed-style fireworks display in which other Arab states, even as Israel was massacring Palestinian civilians, pitched in to help. Then Iran "declared the matter resolved". Gulp.

Sometimes, if only strategically, it makes sense to do what your enemy wants you to, because your enemy is stupid.

This is more or less why Israel has so much support between Evangelical Christians. A relatively large number of these people actually want the world to end because they really believe in the Rapture and that they’ll be saved.

That said, a lot of evangelicals do believe the world is about to end and are willing to pay to hasten the process.

No, the real news here is of course the news: the ICC seeks to arrest Israeli top leaders as much as the Hamas leaders. The subject that is going from being everyone's darling to international pariah is Israel, absolutely no doubt about this. This is a massive win for Palestine and those who claim to fight for it, including Hamas- with the potential for historical consequences.

My take is that this was the intention behind the October 7th attack- to drive Israel to such a violent retaliation as to force the world to take notice and to condemn Israel. I might be wrong and the victory might be entirely an unintended consequence. However your interpretation essentially requires Hamas to have zero knowledge of the real ratio of military force between Hamas/ Iran and Israel, and zero knowledge of the fact that the US have always been ready to commit their entire military for Israel. And even your imagined "win" scenario for Hamas is Israel committing to "a truce"- which is what they already had before Oct 7.

* Iran's fireworks display is the result of Israel, not Hamas, trying to drag Iran into the war.

I see very strong parallels between this and the Dublin 1916 rising. I don't believe the leaders of the Irish rebels could beat the British - it was seen as a "blood sacrifice" and a way to show the world the brutality of British colonial power. The Brits duly obliged and brutally put down the rising and set the wheels of an independent Ireland in motion.

I have to say though, that the 1916 rebels didn't go out of their way to kill civilians like Hamas clearly did on the 7th ...

You're missing an important part about tens of thousands of rockets and mortars being fired from Gaza at Israel and terrorism originating from Gaza at Israel. Israel didn't just randomly attack Gaza.

Here's what really happened in Gaza: Israel completely withdrew in 2005 and was not occupying Gaza any more. It handed the entire Gaza strip to the Palestinian Authority. There was even an agreement for safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_freedom_of_movemen...

Not to mention that even before 2005 Israel handed control of most of the Gaza strip to the PA as part of the Oslo accords (and agreement to hand Gaza and Jericho over to the Palestinians predates the Oslo accords).

In 2007 following Palestinian elections Hamas took control of the Gaza strip by force. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gaza_(2007) Israel only imposed a full blockade of Gaza as a result of this change because Hamas' stated goal is/was the destruction of Israel. Despite Israel's blockade Gaza has a border with Egypt and had no shortage of goods (and weaponry) through smuggling and other means. There was also plenty of travel in and out of the Gaza strip (both towards Israel and the West Bank and towards Egypt) and there were plenty of good going into Gaza through Israel. Gazans also worked in Israel. Gaza also had a power station and a water desalination plant. It has billions of dollars of aid and investment flowing into it (Ismail Hanyah needs to be a billionaire after all).

So Israel was neither an oppressor nor an occupier in Gaza. It took actions to try and prevent Hamas from arming itself.

The other part wrong with your premise is that Palestinians want to live in peace with Israel within the 1967 borders. They do not. Maybe some of them do. But many do not. When the Oslo peace process was accelerating towards that goal Palestinians started a suicide bombing campaign against Israeli civilians which results in the killing of Rabin, the rise of the right, and the termination of the peace process.

EDIT:

Bombings by Hamas starting 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_at...

Rabin's assassination 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Yitzhak_Rabin

1993: Oslo accords https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords

2007: Blockade of Gaza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip

2005: Disengagement from Gaza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaz...

Rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_...

Gaza-Israel barrier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza%E2%80%93Israel_barrier

Netanyahu has supported Hamas long before 2005 as part of a divide and conquer strategy. The elections were pushed by Bush at a time when PA were seen as corrupt. When they lost Bush tried to get them to coup and Hamas took over and kicked them out as a reaction to that.

>In July 1995, Netanyahu led a mock funeral procession featuring a coffin and hangman's noose at an anti-Rabin rally where protesters chanted, "Death to Rabin"

Should tell is everything we need to know about the people in power now.

Maybe the Palestinians were not happy with the deal, them losing their land. Not to forget previous atrocities perpetrated by Jewish terrorists and the nakba.

> Under a 2007 agreement between Egypt and Israel, Egypt controls the crossing but imports through the Rafah crossing require Israeli approval.

Doubly untrue today; Israel took complete control of it on May 6.

Factually this was never Palestinian land. This was Ottoman land, then British land, then Israel. Many Palestinians are not native (e.g. El-Masri, "The Egyptian", is a common family name in Gaza, because they are Egyptians) and the Jewish people have as much of a claim on the land as they do. Parts of the land were also under Egyptian and Jordanian control for some time (ask them why they didn't establish a Palestinian State over these lands while they had them by the way). Jewish refugees immigrated to the region before 1948 because they had nowhere else to go. Many Israeli Jews have been expelled from Arab countries under violence and their assets stolen. The Arab behavior toward Jews in the region is purely racist, there's no other way to look at it.

Also factually what pushed the Israeli right wing to demonstrate was Hamas' suicide bombing attacks. I was there and I know this first hand. You're not going to rewrite history by referring to some random fact.

Israel blockaded Gaza. Blockades are legal. Gaza still had a border with Egypt which Egypt chose to blockade as well. Gaza was effectively a polity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polity) and was at war with Israel. What should amaze you is that Israel supplied Gaza with electricity (Gaza also had their own power station) and with water (Gaza has wells and a desalination plant) and allowed good in all while being enemy territory under the control of Hamas. Hamas stole the aid flowing into Gaza to buy weapons and build tunnels.

> The Nakba was an outcome of Arabs deciding to attack Israel in 1948, they wanted to wipe it off the map, and they lost. They rejected the partition plan.

The "partition plan" was a plan to give part of Palestine to Israel. It's pretty natural that one side refused and the other accepted- the action is the same but the outcome is the opposite for the two parties. Trying to spin it like "they both got the same generous offer" is propaganda.

But even more important is that the partition plan assigned to a "Jewish state" a territory whose population was 45% Palestinian. This means that either

a) they thought it was possible to create a Jewish democratic state with a 45% of the population non-Jewish, or

b) the plan was to enforce apartheid from the beginning, or

c) the plan was ethnic cleansing from the beginning.

And- lo and behold- ethnic cleansing is exactly what happened one minute after the creation of Israel. How convenient that it was the Palestinian's fault.

But this "Nakba" stuff appears invariably to be coded appeals to a "one-state solution". Israel is a nuclear-armed state with one of the world's best trained military and a strong economy that, contrary to activist opinion, stands on its own two feet. There is only one outcome in a "one-state solution" and it's not the one you (or I) want.

It's worth pushing back on existential arguments against Israel as it's currently construed. "Mass murder of Israeli civilians is unprovoked because Nakba" is one of those. The correct response is "no, things are much more complicated than that."

Gaza is considered an occupied territory by all international bodies with the power and authority to make such a determination, for excellent reasons that you can look up. End of the story. What you do (and Israel does, for propaganda purposes) is to confuse the civilian settlement with the military occupation, or to pretend that since soldiers are not inside Gaza but just all around its borders, Gaza is free. Which is like saying that a prison camp is free if the guards are all outside the fence.