No Stupid Questions

This video by a political science professor explains it best: https://youtu.be/zMxHU34IgyY?si=N5oHElN4Xlbiqznh

In short, the only people who truly know are Hamas, and the best the rest of us can do is speculate.

Some possibilities are that Hamas wanted to sabotage normalizing relations between Israel and the rest of the Muslim world, that Hamas wanted to bait Israel into a wildly disproportionate response that would garner themselves sympathy and recruits, that Hamas was bluffing and feigning strength and counting on Israel to think the attack was bait, that Hamas was just acting on bloodlust and wanted to attack regardless of the consequences, or many other possibilities.

Further, we focus a lot on the substative issues, i.e., the grievances and disagreements at hand, but we don't talk about the bargaining frictions nearly enough. There are countless border disputes around the world, and yet they rarely result in war. Why? Because war is costly and most wish to avoid it. War typically happens when there are both substantive issues and bargaining frictions, i.e., things preventing the two sides from negotiating a solution. But us onlookers can't even know for sure what these frictions are, only speculate.

All this is simply the nature of the fog of war, that the true strategies/goals won't be known for a while, if ever. Anyone who tries to tell you with certainty why they did what they did at this stage doesn't actually know with any degree of certainty. Nobody but Hamas actually knows.

I do recommend watching the full video above, as the professor is very engaging, rather amusing, and covers this topic quite thoroughly.

Hostages are variables that Hamas controls and Israel must respect. They can be used as chips to barter with, shields to hide behind, and tools to shame the Israelis in the court of public opinion.

This is just my opinion but, given terrorist organisations are militarily usually much poorer/smaller/weaker than the group they stand against, they need help from outside.

One way to possibly achieve that is to do something awful to provoke your opposition into a retaliation so indiscriminate and horrifying that your ideological (if not literal) allies in the surrounding area step in to attack your enemy.

Their objective was to provoke this response from Israel. Hostages really force Israel to act immediately.

I've heard it suggested that they didn't expect to get as far as they did into Israel and they barely expected to get past the border wall. If that's the case they may not have planned what to do when they did and so there may be no grand strategy behind some or all of it.

I guess we'll never know.

Last time it worked, they got over a thousand prisoners for one soldier.

Taking hostages was the one thing about the entire attack that made some logical sense.

The murdering, on the other hand... that guaranteed a violent response, and doing it in the most brutal way possible and then filming it and bragging about it ensured that Palestine lost most sympanties, and Israel basically got a free pass to do whatever they wanted.

It's an hypothesis only.

But I think the important matter were the foreign ostages, especially from Europe and USA, because those countries do a lot to recover them, including paying big money.

I wondered why Israel didn't attack the weekend they said they would attack. They gave an ultimatum, but didn't act on it. One possibility is that the USA and Europe wanted to try to recover their ostages first.

I think they expected to swap the hostages for Palestinian prisoners, since they've done it before.

As always, motives vary heavily. I think many people have raised great points, and no doubt many of them are accurate enough.

It's the same for Israel, too, right? I would imagine a two state solution is the only reasonable exit strategy, and Israel could make that happen overnight, but they haven't. Why? Again, motives vary heavily.

I don't think Hamas had a long term goal here. I think Iran had the long term goal and shared intel with them and goaded the on to the attack. That's not to excuse anything or one, but in terms of startegy and blowback, I think Irans the one whos counting on that, and Israel is providing it. So all in all I'd say Iran got what they wanted and we're gonna see what they choose to do next.

Israel is killing us slowly and quietly and the world is ignoring it. Maybe if they're provoked into revealing themselves to the world we'll be seen.

Most death are civilians while Hamas getting stronger every year.

Since Iran is standing in the background, we have no idea how many Shahed drones are standing by when they come in.

Whats your plan to get them to stop exterminating palestinians?

Hamas simply wants as many civilian casualties as possible. Then they'll blame Israel and unfortunately a lot of people will buy into that, see the latest idiocy by Fridays for Future.

I'm guessing they though they could use hostages to prevent Israel from just bombing everything and everyone in Gaza as revenge and possibly also trade for something. Too bad Israel gave no shit about hostages and are just bombing everyone anyways, hostages or not.