Neville Teller
It now seems clear that on October 7 Hamas, no doubt urged on by Iran, bit off a good deal more than it could chew.
Its leaders in Gaza (Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif), together with its leaders-in-exile living in luxury in Qatar (Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Meshaal), may have been led by Iran to expect a widespread uprising of the Arab world in support of their massive killing spree in Israel. They may have envisaged their invasion advancing into the country supported by uprisings in the West Bank, an invasion by Hezbollah in the north, perhaps joined by Syrian troops up in the Golan, irregular Jordanian fighters in the east and even Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood militias from the west. Perhaps Iran already had in mind, and promised them, a crushing blow on Israel by launching a direct aerial attack, reversing its long-standing policy of using only proxies in its anti-Israel operations.
This scenario, mouth-wateringly tempting for Hamas, simply failed to materialize. Action of some sort did manifest itself, but on nothing like the scale or with the coordination that would have been politically or militarily meaningful.
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