Israel misreads Hamas and Palestinians' will to attack
Despite Israeli assessments to the contrary, Hamas proved quite willing to step up rocket attacks, and the Palestinian street was more than ready for riot and revolt.
Within a 24-hour span, two of the Israeli defense establishment's long-standing and well-established basic premises were disproved. The first one was that Hamas had been deterred. Seeking to de-escalate the situation, the reasoning went, Hamas was interested in quiet at any cost.
The second premise was that the outbreak of a third intifada in the territories was improbable. There was no negative energy or critical mass or gas fumes that could blow up at any given time. According to that premise, the Palestinian population wanted quiet. Having grown weary of the long years of confrontation, it wanted to improve its standard of living.
Toward the evening of July 2, I had a talk with a high-ranking Israeli security official who said the following: We have clear indications to the effect that Hamas has no intention of ratcheting up the rocket fire; quite the contrary. We're receiving and intercepting indications in that vein from across the front. Given its real strategic distress, the last thing Hamas needs right now is a round of violence. It wants quiet.
The talk with the official took place on the afternoon of July 2, when it seemed that the ground was calming down and the rocket salvos from Gaza on Israel's southern communities were subsiding. Israel's top defense officials assessed that it would become much quieter the following day and that the quiet would last.
