It took just days for decades-old tensions between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas to spiral out of control, causing deaths and chaos not just in Gaza but across the Jewish state. As the escalating violence ignites riots in mixed Jewish-Arab towns in Israel and spurs wide unrest in the West Bank, what do both sides want to achieve in the worst flare-up of violence since 2014?
Hamas, rulers of the impoverished and blockaded Gaza Strip, the crowded home to some two million Palestinians, aims to become the de facto standard bearer of the Palestinian cause, capitalising on the fading leadership of the Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank. In a show of force, Hamas has unleashed some 2,300 rockets on Israel since Monday, reaching as far as Tel Aviv to the north, and Ramon airport to the south.
Israel meanwhile has seized the moment to try to wipe out once and for all Hamas’s sway in the territory by attacking its very infrastructure, analysts say.
The explosion…