Comment by notahacker

Agree Israel could do a lot more in the West Bank (or maybe try just not being there...), but the present conflict is the result of attacks launched from Gaza, the area Israel fully withdrew from in the early 2000s. Gazans freely voted for Hamas for the first time shortly afterwards (which was the last time Hamas permitted them to vote). Ironically, polls for the time suggest that many of the Gazan voters who switched to Hamas did so as a protest against corruption and authoritarian trends in their Fatah govt and believed Hamas should have changed its core position to actually consider negotiating a peace settlement with Israel, but it's a pretty clear example that even drastic unilateral Israeli action (they did remove their settlements in that area... after the changes of government necessary to force it through) need not lead to peaceful outcomes.

Israel and especially its present governing coalition is not blameless for the situation (and nor are Palestinian factions and some of their supposed allies blameless for Israel's tendency to keep electing governing coalitions more interested in projecting power than continuing peace processes), but it's a lot more complicated than Israeli govts wanting Hamas to be a thing and nobody else in the region having agency. Undoing tacit support for an Islamist alternative to the PLO in the 1970s isn't really a policy option (if it is, someone should give the undo button to the US for Afghanistan!), that happened because there was open conflict long before Hamas and Netanyahu, and apparent diplomatic wins for the PLO did them absolutely no good in the noughties when Palestinians could still choose whether or not to vote for therm