Quote:
Originally Posted by CroFlames
I'll never understand what advantage Hamas thought they were gaining by keeping those hostages. Gaza is rubble now and thousands are dead.
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All they care about is power. They got two really important things:
1. World sympathy. They goaded Israel into actions that ended up overshadowing the original heinous acts of October 7th. They don't care about the amount of civilian lives lost, anything making Israel lose favour in the international community helps their cause.
2. A generation of recruits. There are a ton of children and young people who had their homes bombed, their family members killed, and their lives destroyed. There's enough anger for Hamas to tap into for the foreseeable future to bolster their ranks as needed.
Things will not be like Northern Ireland where they have been gradually working past the hate together, with tensions fizzling and people living as neighbours more and more. This is going to be more like the former Yugoslavia which ended in horrendous conflict and genocide, and now a population that formerly lived among each other is completely segregated even within the split of nations that formed, and things remain on a knife's edge.