The Hamas attack on Israel used tactics that made atrocities into a powerful weapon that made it more difficult to identify Hamas fighters unless they were carrying a weapon. Hamas also hides among civilians and likes to use civilians as human shields when attacking Israeli. If the Israelis shoot back anyway, Hamas considers the dead civilians as involuntary martyrs for the cause. For Hamas there is no bad publicity. While Israelis and Western nations deplore the ruthless tactics Hamas uses, they have a difficult time coping with Hamas unless they adopt some the atrocious Hamas methods. This aids Hamas as well because Hamas did not encourage or sometimes did not allow civilians to leave Gaza city as the Israeli attack force is preparing to attack the city. The civilians have nowhere to go because Egypt has closed its borders to Palestinians.

Egypt has its own economic problems and is hostile to any pro-Iran activity inside Egypt because Iran has been hostile to Egypt for a long time. One reason for that is Egypt made peace with Irael decades ago and both countries allow their citizens to freely visit their neighbor and trade is encouraged. Both nations have profited from the natural gas deposits discovered offshore from Lebanon to Egypt. Israel briefly pulled most workers off an offshore natural gas off the southern Israeli coast. The Hamas surge never got that far but Israeli soldiers are still searching the for stray Hamas gunmen still looking for Israelis to kill. The Hamas surge or flood tactics suffered more losses from Israelis shoot back and individual Hamas men wandering away from the group and losing contact.

While several senior Hamas leaders have recently killed by Israeli airstrikes, there is still a Hamas leadership structure outside the region. Their mission to persuade Western media that the Hamas cause if just and so is killing all Israelis, including women and children, they encounter. Hamas justifies this to strike back at their oppressor. Israel and Palestinians have long disagreed on what the oppression consists of. For Palestinians the existence of Israel and the presence of Jews the region. The Israelis say they came in peace, created prosperity and persuaded Britian and the UN to recognize Israel as a nation. The nearby Arab states objected to that and fought three more wars with Israel, losing them all and agreeing to make peace with Israel.

The Palestinians were not Palestinians initially but local Arabs that refused to recognize Israeli independence. Most of these Arabs lived in the West Bank and Gaza. Neighboring Arab states refused to absorb the Palestinians and Jordan had to fight a brief war with their Palestinian refugees who had staged a rebellion against the Jordanians in 1970. The Palestinians were defeated and driven into Syria.

The UN sought to help by demanding that Israeli allow Palestinians who fled their homes during the end of the 1947-49 war Israelis fought to establish their independence. The displaced Arabs who refused to recognize the new state of Israeli also refused many other solutions that the UN and Israel agreed on and offered and instead lived in the West Bank and Gaza, which could have been an independents state but many of the Arabs insisted that Israeli surrender more territory and when Israeli refused the West Bank and Gaza Arabs, who rebranded themselves as Palestinians in the 1960s, demanded that Israeli be destroyed and replaced with a Palestinian state that contained no Jews. That has been the underlying goal of the Palestinians ever since. Their elected leaders are corrupt and tell the UN and donor nations that they just want peace with Israel while doing little to make that happen. The Palestinians have tried several different tactics to fight Israel, or at least kill Israelis and none have succeeded. Thus, like the four wars Arabs fought with Israel and lost, Palestinians were running out of ideas, until Hamas came up with a bold and bloody solution that is leading to more disappointment. The current Hamas attack has killed more Israeli civilians than in any war since the first one that ended in 1949 with the recognition of Israel as a nation. Many Arabs refuse to accept that and support groups like Hamas that keep trying. Many Arabs see what the problems and the solution is making peace with Israel and doing business with them. This is especially true since the prosperous Perian Gulf oil states are threatened by Iran, as are Israel and Arab states like Egypt that depend on the Gulf states for investments and financial assistance. Iran backs Hamas and has paid for all those rockets they launched at Israel as well as training and other support for Hamas members. There is a pattern to the Hamas offensive, and it has its roots in Iran and Arabs who are obsessed with destroying Israel and killing or driving all Jews out of the region. This is nothing new. The Arabs were big admirers of the Nazis during the 1930s and World War II. The Nazis wanted to kill all Jews everywhere. The Jews survived but so did the hate. Many people worldwide support Hamas, some without realizing what Hamas is and where it came from. Hamas will fail but its goals will persist.