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Notes -
I have various Israel-Palestine questions for people more informed than me:
What do you think Israel will do about the hostage situation?
What’s the likelihood of Hezbollah becoming involved?
What is the significance of Saudi Arabia and Qatar blaming Israel on the attacks?
How do Israeli settlers factor in here? Were they the primary subjects of violence yesterday or no?
Attempt to free them via military operation. Commentary has been dropping all day in the Israeli press that negotiation isn’t viable this time, the demands will be for everyone to be released, and given several of the most senior organizers of this raid were formerly prisoners of Israel transferred in swaps, it’s hard to see them dealing again. Perhaps Qatar can be bribed by the US into convincing Hamas to free a few civilians to gain more favor in Washington (more likely for foreign civilians), but most will die.
Medium. That it wasn’t a two-pronged attack suggests it’s unlikely they coordinated with Hezbollah, now that the element of surprise is gone an attack would be harder. Hezbollah isn’t entirely immune to Lebanon’s financial crisis either, it’s good for consolidating their authority but bad for many of their commercial interests, which in addition to the IRGC make up a large part of their funding. They may still go for it depending on how things go down in the next few days or weeks.
Qatar is an Iranian ally and home to Hamas’ political/diplomatic leadership (whether they actually call the shots in Gaza is very debatable). Saudi Arabia was always going to do this, it’s a sensitive time for them and the population (which the House of Saud has been scared of since 1979) is extremely hostile to Israel.
‘Settlers’ generally refer to Jews - mostly Religious Zionists (a specific grouping in Israeli politics) - living in Jewish settlements built on land internationally recognized (including by the US) as Palestinian, but guarded by Israeli troops. The attacks yesterday were on Israel proper, so the victims were not settlers in that sense. That said, things could easily pop off in East Jerusalem, at which point violence between West Bank Palestinians and Settlers would likely break out. Unlike liberal festivalgoers, Settlers are also often armed and have their own posses.
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