Faced with the onslaught of rockets that Hamas has rained down on Israeli cities since May 10, it is impossible to avoid asking a few simple questions: What does Hamas hope to gain? What is it seeking? What is its war strategy?

It can’t be the end of the “Israeli occupation,” because there has not been a single Israeli soldier stationed in Gaza since the withdrawal engineered by Ariel Sharon in 2005. Ergo no occupation, colonization, or territorial dispute of any kind.

Given the continuous fratricidal war that has simmered between Hamas and its “brothers” on the West Bank since the former wielded terror to take control of Gaza two years later, the goal obviously can neither be to show “solidarity” with the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas.

Nor can it be the “blockade” that is supposedly strangling the enclave, and this is so for three reasons. First, Gaza has not one but two borders with the rest of the world, so the “anti-blockaders,” if they were sincere, should also consider Egypt, which controls Gaza’s southern border. Second, of the two borders, the one with Israel is the less closed, since it allows daily passage, even in wartime—of water, gas, and electricity. As well as the hundreds of trucks that supply the enclave’s everyday needs. Not to mention the flow in the other direction of hundreds of Palestinian civilians who come into Israel each day to receive medical treatment in Tel Aviv’s hospitals. And third, since the blockade affects only items that can be used to produce military equipment like what is now being used to attack Israel, all that Hamas would need to do to lift the blockade would be to cease the attacks, which, only serve to tighten the blockade.

So, no.

Hamas has no clear objective that might be the subject of a dialogue and eventual compromise.

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