The attacks of October 7th were less a military attack, unsurprisingly being that it was executed by Hamas, than a terrorist attack. Here are the top things to keep in mind as we try to understand what they want. …

This isn’t a negotiation: I think it is an error to think they took hostages like their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers did in order to make a political statement, get comrades out of jail, or raise their profile on the global stage to bring attention to their cause and humiliate their enemies, no, this seems different. They have spent most of the last two decades using aid money to build a three dimensional and unmapped battlespace that would make any ground battle on par with Stalingrad, Fallujah, or Azovstal. I asked the question yesterday if we should give them the war they want, and that is why they have taken hostages after displaying an almost unimaginable degree of barbarity in rape, murder, and kidnapping more in line with the steppe raiders of the pre-history. They slaughtered more Jews in a day since the Nazi extermination camps of the 1940s. We now have a death toll almost double of what we first thought, a death toll that if you scaled to population would be as if 50,000 Americans were slaughtered in one day in the most personal, brutal, and face-to-face way your nightmares could produce. Hamas wants to give the Israelis no option but to come into their field of battle they’ve built just for this right under everyone’s useful idiot noses.

[Read on for Salamander’s three cases of the coming war. I suspect that Hamas wanted the third but is more likely to get the first. — Ed]