Max, I am just an arm-chair guy like you, and perplexed as you are .

My best guess is that this was a miscalculation on Iran's part. I have heard that Saudi Arabia and Israel were about to make nice, and that would be very very bad for Iran. I think they wanted to force Israel to attack Hamas and thus make it politically impossible for any Israel-Saudi peace. But they over shot the mark. Many times Hamas has fired thousands of rockets and crossed the border.

This time Israel screwed up. They used these fancy tele-operated machine guns instead of live troops, and Hamas brilliantly took out the "tele" part of that equation.

So I think the number of Israeli dead is 10x or 50x more than what they imagined.

oh crap!! careful what you wish for.

I just wish Israel had the luxury of time, to flush Hamas out slowly, so the death rate was lower.

Though the real death rate is going to be Hamas itself. there are 50K folks that are part of Hamas, and many of them are just Dad's who are fed up with the situation. Sad they gonna die for it.

But really keeping them alive will just drown another generation in Gaza. Too bad we could ship them off to Iran, and have the world pay for their up keep.