Yes, Hamas should be blamed for seizing and refusing to release hostages effectively gained via an ill conceived pogrom that no one could possibly have expected to have had any different of an outcome than it has had. The most accurate and reasonable observation that I saw after the October raid was simply, “Hamas just shot every Palestinian in the dick.”

With that said, none of this excuses Israel and the IDF’s response, regardless of his predictable it has been. Nor does it excuse an increasingly ethnofascist apartheid state.