What were they thinking? Hamas and Netanyahu have yet to explain

Israel Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Credit: Flash90

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What were they thinking?

It’s a question both Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist government have yet to answer.

Hamas and the Netanyahu government’s generic justifications of the carnage created by the group’s year-old October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s ferocious response, including the Palestinians’ right to resist occupation and Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ do not cut the ice.

In a twist of irony, Hamas and the Netanyahu government mirror one another in their imagery of the other, their inability and/or refusal to formulate realistic goals, and their off-the-charts cost/benefit analysis of the war.

As a result, Hamas and the government maintain a long-standing, debilitating fixture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which hardliners and maximalists sometimes wittingly, sometimes unwittingly, reinforce each other.