Hostages, some battered and bloodied, and mutilated Israeli bodies, paraded through Gaza City to cheering crowds. What % of all Gazans participated? Liberally, maybe as a many as a few thousand out of 2 mil Gaza residents. The rest were, I imagine, watching in horror, because they knew full well what this would unleash on them.

Of course that’s not how those images played to a traumatized Israeli population. They would tend to see it as all Gazans cheering the barbarity, I’m sure. Many, not all, Israelis felt like many Americans after 9/11 who wanted to carpet bomb the entire Middle East. “Turn it into a parking lot”.

It’s awfully hard to ask Israelis to see anyone in Gaza as innocent, and Palestinians facing the complete destruction of their enclave aren’t going to be very charitable in their assessment of Israelis. Which leaves only one winner - Hamas. I don’t even think Iran, Hezbollah, or the houthis are winners in this. I think they are being dragged towards a full blown regional conflict that might be ruinous to them, too.