I don’t know.

But when you give your enemies the chance to say “Look, they kidnapped babies and are holding them hostage.” The level that it will have to reach will be much higher.

Example: it takes 100 ostracization units to reach that limit because you have raised it by having kidnapped babies and foreign nationals, whereas if you had given back the people that had nothing to do with this, it might be at a level 10 ostracization units.

It’s a lot easier to justify bad things happening too bad people dependent on the level of bad that they are, and baby kidnappers are pretty high on the list.

Now that group that captured a bunch of people that had nothing to do with it, but then immediately release them?

That shows that they are not trying to involve innocents and that whenever they do get caught up in it is obviously an accident and will be remedied as soon as possible.

You can justify bombing, baby killers, way easier than legitimate freedom fighters.

Really think about this now, and not just because you think we’re on opposing sides here because fuck Israel and everything they stay in for right now.

Just think about how much easier it would be for Hamas to have support and Israel to look that much worse, even though they are conducting the same actions, if they were not holding innocent people.

Notice nowhere in there did I say that they would need to release Israeli soldiers, those are legitimate targets.

It can be sort of hazy on who exactly qualifies for that in Israel, because of conscription, but we can damn sure say that those babies in for nationals had nothing to do with it, and that we would all be way more supportive of Hamas, if not more down on Israel.

At the end of the day they made the decision that shitty people would make.

They crossed the line from freedom fighters to terrorists.

This is ignoring the Rockets, because they have the iron dome and most of the time it is just costing Israel money to shoot down a fucking rocket.

Legitimate military tactic, trading a cheap rocket for an expensive iron dome missile and hurting your enemies economy.

Sort of underhanded because the part might hurt an innocent person put the chances of that are low and it’s asymmetric warfare.