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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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I’m not 100 percent sure what Hamas expected. In my mind I boil it down to three scenarios.

  1. The one you outlined in your post, where Hamas expected an immediate uprising in the West Bank and an immediate response by Hezbollah and Iran.
  2. Hamas expected to get massive Israeli resistance and be stopped a few hundred meters out from the wall. In this scenario, Hamas was expecting a large battle where three or four hundred IDF soldiers were killed, which would justify some air strikes but not necessarily a full invasion. The current situation is the result of Hamas being victims of their own success.
  3. Hamas expected the exact scenario they have now, and are willing to burn themselves and Gaza just to scotch the Abraham accords and get the Palestinian question back on the table.

I suspect different participants may have had different scenarios in mind. The guys who were actually going in were probably pumped up with scenario one, while the leadership actually had in mind scenarios two or three.