Meanwhile,
Hamas tells the New York Times they want “permanent” war for their political purposes, and designed the October 7 massacres to get one. They envision a state of total war with Israel that will force other Arab nations to join them to destroy Israel and slaughter its Jews, and the weeks since have only brought them closer to that goal.
But in the bloody arithmetic of Hamas’s leaders, the carnage is not the regrettable outcome of a big miscalculation. Quite the opposite, they say: It is the necessary cost of a great accomplishment — the shattering of the status quo and the opening of a new, more volatile chapter in their fight against Israel.
It was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership body, told The New York Times in Doha, Qatar. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”