Israel believed that both Palestinian factions were essentially content with ruling their own little fiefdoms, but over the past couple of years Hamas has clearly been developing other ideas. It was making no headway in advancing control of the national movement despite Israeli policies that made Fatah and the PLO look weak and pathetic. Hamas inmates and other Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have recently been treated much more harshly. The momentum of the national struggle seemed to have shifted decisively to the West Bank, led by unaffiliated armed youth gangs such as the “Lion’s Den,” an ad hoc militia group that has no allegiance to any established party and that formed in the warrens of Nablus’s Old City. Hamas leaders were being quietly shown the door by Turkey. And Qatar, which had been funding the Gaza economy under Hamas (with the approval of Israel, the United States, Egypt, and Fatah), started grumbling about the need for a more sustainable Gaza economy.
Worst of all, the broader Muslim Brotherhood movement in the rest of the Arab world—except for another enclave in western Libya—had effectively collapsed as a viable political force and network, leaving Hamas feeling isolated and increasingly dependent on the pro-Iranian Shiite Islamist network, with which it is politically sympathetic but religiously incompatible (Hamas are Sunni Islamists). In recent months, Hamas clearly decided to take drastic action against Israel that would force a change in a status quo that was no longer useful to them because they were slowly losing influence, momentum, and international backing, and they foresaw no end of that trend. Reports strongly indicate that they were egged on by Iran and Hezbollah in a series of meetings in Beirut, with the powerful Lebanese militia making vague promises (that, mercifully, have so far been ignored) to intervene if and when Hamas launched a major attack against Israel.
The worst part of Hamas’s cynicism is that it intended to provoke the kind of devastating Israeli overreaction that is unfolding on the ground today. There is no way that Hamas leaders were unaware that, as a matter of policy and doctrine, Israel would insist on inflicting wildly disproportionate losses on the Palestinians. Moreover, Hamas is trying to lure Israel into a prolonged re-occupation of the urban centers in Gaza in the hopes that it can launch an insurgency that begins to pick off Israeli troops in small numbers over time, even if initially the organization is smashed to pieces (along with much of Gaza and its population).