> After all, the primary purpose of the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation was to try to capture enough Israelis to force a prisoner exchange and get their own people back
You can't possibly believe this when there are numerous confirmed reports of entire families being massacred with 0 hostages taken. If your purpose was really to take hostages; those could have been easy bargain chips; instead they raped them, murdered them and paraded their bodies in front of cheerful crowds.
If the central point of the operation was to grab hostages; their whereabouts and well being (or at least survival) would have been central to the whole ordeal; instead the were disseminated with little to no proof of life. It doesn't even appear that the Hamas leadership knew what to do with them, or even had them accounted for and located.
The goal of the attacks was to inflict a major blow to the Israeli government by forcing a strong military response that would delay the normalisation of the relations between Israel and other arab states. To do so Hamas was wiling to sacrifice civilian blood which is exactly what is happening now. They placed their hideouts in schools hospitals, and NGO headquarters to maximise the political cost of any military operation. Hostages were "nice to have" as they were supposed to further increase the pressure on the Israeli government by people who would be pushing for their return.
They did not anticipate how far BiBi was willing to go and they are definitely paying for it in blood now.
You can't possibly believe this when there are numerous confirmed reports of entire families being massacred with 0 hostages taken. If your purpose was really to take hostages; those could have been easy bargain chips; instead they raped them, murdered them and paraded their bodies in front of cheerful crowds.
If the central point of the operation was to grab hostages; their whereabouts and well being (or at least survival) would have been central to the whole ordeal; instead the were disseminated with little to no proof of life. It doesn't even appear that the Hamas leadership knew what to do with them, or even had them accounted for and located.
The goal of the attacks was to inflict a major blow to the Israeli government by forcing a strong military response that would delay the normalisation of the relations between Israel and other arab states. To do so Hamas was wiling to sacrifice civilian blood which is exactly what is happening now. They placed their hideouts in schools hospitals, and NGO headquarters to maximise the political cost of any military operation. Hostages were "nice to have" as they were supposed to further increase the pressure on the Israeli government by people who would be pushing for their return.
They did not anticipate how far BiBi was willing to go and they are definitely paying for it in blood now.