Preface that I have no solutions to offer to the conflict.
But if a school bully takes your lunch one too many times, he’s eventually gonna get punched in the face. But in this case, Hamas is too underpowered to be the school bully.
It’s more like the mosquito that just won’t stop buzzing in your ear even though you are traipsing in his forest. Except this mosquito flies with 2m of his closest brothers and sisters and your response is to burn his forest down.
I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Hamas has annoyed Israel one too many times and now is getting an angry, irrational response with tons of collateral damage. Not a calculated response.
Perhaps the only thing I can offer is that the response from Israel isn’t all that irrational. Every person can be driven to the point of breaking and lashing out.
Israel has obviously completely had it with Hamas and would rather bear the international consequences of wiping Gaza off the map instead of facing one more rocket across that border. Honestly that is a pretty fucking huge miscalculation for Hamas. Because Israel is a much better international diplomat and the winner gets to write the history book.
When you have two kids on the school yard that are lashing out, the principal comes along and makes sure neither crosses the others path again. That may be how this ends, but I fear the world doesn’t care enough about either side to get involved that way.