In a sense, Hamas had to have known that what they were going to do was going to have a HUGE military response from Israel. Govts are like the Mafia, they can’t just let any disrespect go unpunished. Hamas planned on indiscriminately killing civilians and taking hostages. I’m not sure any government in the world wouldn’t have had a predictable military response of some kind.

Hamas seems to have misjudged the extant to which Israel was willing to go (all-out war and extermination of Hamas), but they still knew at some level that Israel was going to come in shooting and killing civilians. Israel shoots at kids for throwing rocks, of course Hamas knew civilians were getting killed from their actions. Add in that Netanyahu has his own unrelated troubles in Israel and he needed a disaster like this to distract the public. Plus, Israel would take any excuse it could to further erode Gaza, so they basically handed Israel a gift-wrapped war.

Does that absolve Israel’s military from indiscriminately killing civilians? Absolutely not, they have their own issues with systemic racism towards Arabs that’s built up over decades and a military that’s apparently given up on professionalism and following the rule of law. I think their calculus is total extermination of Hamas and further encroachment into Palestinian lands, to them that’s more than worth whatever civilian casualties and international condemnation they get for a few months of conflict.