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Last Saturday, the organisers of the Supernova Music Festival,

taking place in the Negev Desert Israel,

put up a post on social media.

It read,

The time has come when the whole family is about to get together again,

and what fun it's going to be. Hours later and 260 or more of that family of music fans

have been killed by the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Altogether, more than 1,200 Israelis died in the incursion. A similar number of Palestinians

are thought to have died so far in Israel's response. Such an attack was bound to provoke a massive

reaction. So what was Hamas's thinking? What went wrong with Israel's preparedness, and what's likely to happen now?

Step inside the briefing room, and together we'll try to find out.

Joining me in the briefing room, a Shashank Joshi, defense editor at The Economist,

and Jennifer Jeffreys, Director of Curriculum at the Security Studies Program

in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

In 2021, Jennifer joined us for our program, What Does Hamas Want, which is available now on BBC Sounds?

In this discussion, we'll look at Hamas first, And Jennifer Jeffery is back in 2021 when you were on the

program, you told us how Hamas had evolved from being a religious social action body, essentially,

to being an armed force. Can you just remind us now of how Hamas came to run Gaza?

Absolutely. So we talked in 2021 about the fact that, you know, Hamas emerged in the 1980s

sort of as this counterbalance to the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which had really

been the voice of the Palestinian people from the 1960s and was a designated terrorist

organization itself.

...