"At first we were ecstatic": Gaza's FAFO moment and Iran's strategic miscalculationHot Air by Ed Morrissey October 10, 2023
I bet they were. In fact, we hardly need the Gazan testimony today to know that they fully supported Hamas’ launch of war against Israeli civilians in mass attacks around Gaza’s borderlands. In video after video promulgated by the Gazans and Hamas terrorists themselves, we saw them dancing in the streets as they dragged bodies and hostages into Gaza from Israel, and mocking and terrorizing children hostages as part of their celebration.
As Haaretz reports today, though, it has begun to dawn on Gazans that they seriously miscalculated how Israel and its allies would respond to this war. “At first we were ecstatic,” one Gazan tells their reporter, celebrating it as a “historic day.” Now they are finding out just how historic it might be, as it might send Palestinian Gaza into the history books:
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So why should anyone object when Israel responds by defeating and subjugating Gaza in the barbaric war their government launched and they cheered?
What becomes clear in this piece from the far-Left Haaretz is the dawning realization that Gazans made a fatal miscalculation by launching this war. They cheered when Hamas terrorists dragged hostages back because they assumed that the Israelis would play by the old rules: some retaliatory attacks and then generous terms for hostage swaps. They likely assumed that Israel’s allies in the West would pressure them, as usual, to use only “proportional” force in precision-targeted strikes.
Instead, the attacks forced Israel to confront a hard reality: there is no peaceful coexistence with Hamas or any other Iranian proxy on its borders. Having tolerated the missile attacks for eighteen years, Israel had hardened its defenses in the calculation that settling the Gaza question would be far more costly than simply isolating it and controlling its borders to keep arms from getting in. This Hamas attack exposed the folly of that approach, as well as the miscalculation of containment of Iran’s ambition to annihilate Israel.
They now have no choice but to uproot and destroy Hamas’ footprint in Gaza and ensure it never returns — and that likely means the end of Gaza as a Palestinian settlement. That should please Egypt, even if they won’t admit it, as Hamas was a malevolent branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the enemy of the al-Sisi regime there. It would remove the Palestinian issue from their border and make it into a West Bank/Jordan problem. Whatever other issues this creates for al-Sisi, removing that headache and putting Israel in control of Gaza may well be worth it.
More:
https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2023/10/10/at-first-we-were-ecstatic-gazas-fafo-moment-and-irans-strategic-miscalculation-n583689
