This video by a political science professor explains it best: https://youtu.be/zMxHU34IgyY?si=N5oHElN4Xlbiqznh

In short, the only people who truly know are Hamas, and the best the rest of us can do is speculate.

Some possibilities are that Hamas wanted to sabotage normalizing relations between Israel and the rest of the Muslim world, that Hamas wanted to bait Israel into a wildly disproportionate response that would garner themselves sympathy and recruits, that Hamas was bluffing and feigning strength and counting on Israel to think the attack was bait, that Hamas was just acting on bloodlust and wanted to attack regardless of the consequences, or many other possibilities.

Further, we focus a lot on the substative issues, i.e., the grievances and disagreements at hand, but we don't talk about the bargaining frictions nearly enough. There are countless border disputes around the world, and yet they rarely result in war. Why? Because war is costly and most wish to avoid it. War typically happens when there are both substantive issues and bargaining frictions, i.e., things preventing the two sides from negotiating a solution. But us onlookers can't even know for sure what these frictions are, only speculate.

All this is simply the nature of the fog of war, that the true strategies/goals won't be known for a while, if ever. Anyone who tries to tell you with certainty why they did what they did at this stage doesn't actually know with any degree of certainty. Nobody but Hamas actually knows.

I do recommend watching the full video above, as the professor is very engaging, rather amusing, and covers this topic quite thoroughly.

Hostages are variables that Hamas controls and Israel must respect. They can be used as chips to barter with, shields to hide behind, and tools to shame the Israelis in the court of public opinion.

The idea behind most terrorism is that a weaker opponent provokes a larger, more powerful one into making a political/strategic mistake.

For example, 9/11 wasn't about knocking down some towers, it was about getting the US entangled in a foreign war with boots on the ground.

For this attack, when Israel invades gaza with armour and soldiers, a LOT of people on both sides will die. Every dead gazan will be a martyr, every dead Israeli solider is, well a dead Israeli. Maybe that retribution becomes too much for the international community, maybe the scenes that will inevitably come from gaza will ignite the Arab world etc.

Israel is killing us slowly and quietly and the world is ignoring it. Maybe if they're provoked into revealing themselves to the world we'll be seen.

So the history of Israel and it's neighbors is long and complex. A short summary might be that when Israel was formed none of its neighbors recognized it as a state and invaded. Over the years there has been significant conflict, with wrongs perpetuated on both sides. Eventually Egypt and Jordan officially recognized Israel as a state and began a long period of normalization of relations between the two.

The remaining neighbors, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank are more complicated. Gaza elected Hamas who has sworn to destroy Israel. West Bank and the Palestinian authority has negotiated over the years with Israel, and in my opinion been treated poorly. Syria and Lebanon (with Hezbollah) still refuse to acknowledge Israel as a state and vow to fight it until it's destruction.

Behind all of this is Iran, who funds and coordinates training and resources for the various Arab groups fighting against Israel. The ongoing terrorist activity in the region makes it almost impossible for a true negotiation to occur and a transfer of stewardship of the three districts in the West Bank to full Palestinian governance.

So why does Hamas invade and take hostages? Because they have seen ongoing efforts to normalize relations between Arab countries and Israel, including with Saudi Arabia, and that is exactly what they don't want. Remember, they only exist to destroy Israel. That is their entire governance platform. By provoking Israel to invade, it creates unrest in the region, staining relations between Arab leaders and Israel. Which is what Hamas wants.

The take away should be that religious ethnic states are a humanitarian and diplomatic mess. There are no easy answers or solutions when the platform of one country is that the other country must cease to exist. Likewise, Israel just can't get out of its own way with respect to exacerbating tensions via settlers in the West Bank and occupation of the Golan heights. Though to be fair, the Golan heights were captured, like the West Bank, after the countries who controlled them attacked Israel in the six day war.

So to answer your question, yes, this is all playing out like someone wanted. That someone is Hamas.

This is just my opinion but, given terrorist organisations are militarily usually much poorer/smaller/weaker than the group they stand against, they need help from outside.

One way to possibly achieve that is to do something awful to provoke your opposition into a retaliation so indiscriminate and horrifying that your ideological (if not literal) allies in the surrounding area step in to attack your enemy.

Their objective was to provoke this response from Israel. Hostages really force Israel to act immediately.

I've heard it suggested that they didn't expect to get as far as they did into Israel and they barely expected to get past the border wall. If that's the case they may not have planned what to do when they did and so there may be no grand strategy behind some or all of it.

I guess we'll never know.

It's an hypothesis only.

But I think the important matter were the foreign ostages, especially from Europe and USA, because those countries do a lot to recover them, including paying big money.

I wondered why Israel didn't attack the weekend they said they would attack. They gave an ultimatum, but didn't act on it. One possibility is that the USA and Europe wanted to try to recover their ostages first.

Last time it worked, they got over a thousand prisoners for one soldier.

Taking hostages was the one thing about the entire attack that made some logical sense.

The murdering, on the other hand... that guaranteed a violent response, and doing it in the most brutal way possible and then filming it and bragging about it ensured that Palestine lost most sympanties, and Israel basically got a free pass to do whatever they wanted.

As always, motives vary heavily. I think many people have raised great points, and no doubt many of them are accurate enough.

It's the same for Israel, too, right? I would imagine a two state solution is the only reasonable exit strategy, and Israel could make that happen overnight, but they haven't. Why? Again, motives vary heavily.

I think they expected to swap the hostages for Palestinian prisoners, since they've done it before.

Whats your plan to get them to stop exterminating palestinians?

I don't think Hamas had a long term goal here. I think Iran had the long term goal and shared intel with them and goaded the on to the attack. That's not to excuse anything or one, but in terms of startegy and blowback, I think Irans the one whos counting on that, and Israel is providing it. So all in all I'd say Iran got what they wanted and we're gonna see what they choose to do next.

Hamas simply wants as many civilian casualties as possible. Then they'll blame Israel and unfortunately a lot of people will buy into that, see the latest idiocy by Fridays for Future.

Most death are civilians while Hamas getting stronger every year.

I'm guessing they though they could use hostages to prevent Israel from just bombing everything and everyone in Gaza as revenge and possibly also trade for something. Too bad Israel gave no shit about hostages and are just bombing everyone anyways, hostages or not.