From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bolarro.

This is the Daily.

Today, to much of the outside world, Hamas's decision to murder hundreds of Israelis

and trigger a war that has since killed many thousands of its own people looks like a historic

miscalculation, one that could soon result in the destruction of Hamas itself.

My colleague Ben Hubbard has been reporting on that decision

and the deliberate calculations that when on that went into it.

The deliberate calculations that went into it. It's Tuesday, November 14th.

It's Tuesday, November 14th. 14.

Then, since October 7, Since Hamas breached Israel's border and killed 1,200 people, according to Israel, the vast majority of them

civilians.

I think a really important question has largely gone unanswered, which is why? Why undertake such a

horrifying terror attack that entailed the mass murder of non-combatants? And why do that when Hamas had to

understand on some level that it would trigger an overwhelming reprisal from

Israel that would end the lives of so many Palestinian

civilians, which is exactly what's happened. This was a highly planned and

highly organized attack that clearly had a strategy behind it.

So what was it?

That's what I set out to understand.

After the attack, I think everybody was asking that question of why would Hamas which sort of ruling in

Gaza and has this control and you know why would they suddenly do something like this

that was actually described by one of my colleagues as a suicide attack on itself.

...