To me it’s obvious where blame lies. Gaza residents voted Hamas into power, despite Hamas’s vile charter pledging erasure of Israel and Jews and so on. Hamas then spent more than a decade launching tens of thousands of rocket attacks against civilian targets in Israel.
The mass murder and rape of October 7 was completely in character for Hamas. And for people saying Hamas isn’t the same as the residents of Gaza - look at footage from October 7 where the streets were full of Gazans cheering as the dead naked bodies of women, with blood on their genitalia, were paraded through Gaza city.
All of this speaks to October 7 being exactly an attack launched by Hamas of its own volition, with the support of Gazans.
As for this:
> Anyone who's been to and seen the Gaza border knows how impossible it is to cross - unless of course there was some inside permittance.
They used paragliders. This is well known. They don’t have to climb walls with barbed wire if they fly over them.
Reminder:
* The last parlimentary election held in Palestine was 2006 [1].
* The median age in Palestine as of 2023 was 19.8 [2].
* The voting age in Palestine is 21 [1].
In other words, the majority of the population today were born after the last major election, and they aren't voting age now, let alone at the time of the last election. When you account for people who were voting age in the last elections, the number of people still around today is a rather small minority. It shrinks even further when you consider that Hamas only got 44% of the votes for Parliament (alas, due to how district votes are handled, that gave Hamas 74 of 132 seats).
Given that, I'm a little less sure about holding the current population of Palestine responsible for Hamas. You could argue they should be doing more to displace Hamas, but perhaps that can wait until after they're done worrying about starving to death or being shot by IDF snipers while accepting food from aid workers.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Palestine
2. https://ourworldindata.org/profile/population-demography/pal...
See also: https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/11/01/majority-palestinians...
My other experiences with Palestinians revealed that they're very empathetic people and they integrate quite well into other cultures when they're not bombed or shot at.
A year prior, they had documentation of a plan like what unfolded on October 7th, but dismissed it for reasons I won't speculate on. Google 'Jericho Wall'.
Approximately 3 weeks prior to October 7th, Unit 8200 produced a document based on months of research, that showed Hamas seemed to be doing a lot of training and coordinating for something.
In the days prior, Egypt warned Israel that something big was happening imminently, but again, it was ignored for reasons I won't speculate on.
The night before, the IDF identified a number of anomalies in Hama's behavior but did nothing with this information.
A number of members of the intelligence and military leadership have stepped down since, acknowledging the failures.
Anyhow, for whatever reason, your belief that this was completely in character for Hamas, seems to be at odds with the beliefs of Israel's intelligence and military community in the months and days prior to the attack on October 7th. Which is, odd, to say the very least.
People who've been to that border in normal times know how fiercely that border is protected.
Hamas are crazy fundamentalists that Iran is using along with Hezbollah to perpetrate attacks against Israel. Just what Netanyahu needs to start another war.
They're normal people—dentists, engineers, bakers, whatever—born into an environment with no sovereignty and the constant threat of death or worse. That's enough to put a gun in anyone's hand. We must stop with this wholly inaccurate and shallow characterization. They are not Boko Haram or ISIS or Al-Qaeda. In fact, they worked with the IDF when ISIS was messing with them about 8 years ago. Are they predominantly muslim? Yes. But their struggle is for sovereignty, not fanatic fundamentalism.
> they are just a terrorist organization and recently designated as such in most of the civilized world
I would not call the west "civilized". We're just rich. We call a lot of people terrorists and overlook our own terrorism, like basically everything the CIA & the IDF & the mossad do. convenient eh?
PLEASE read anything but western news, I'm begging you. You don't realize how insane you sound to most of the civilized world.
There wasn't any chance of Hamas being overthrown by the Palestinians either. With clandestine support from both Israel and Qatar, Hamas ensured that they were the only ones with guns on the Strip.
Yahya Sinwar was captured and imprisoned in a Mossad cell for years. Even if he weren't an active Israeli puppet, Mossad would've easily known the ways they could manipulate him into a specific action, and egged him to carry that out. It's already been established that the Hamas leadership in Qatar were in the dark with respect to the October 7 attacks when they first happened too. I don't condone Hamas either, but it's also very likely Israel is heavily complicit.
Anyone who's been to and seen the Gaza border knows how impossible it is to cross - unless of course there was some inside permittance.