Comment by tsimionescu

I'm claiming that October 7th was a pretext. If October 7th hadn't happened, they would have done the exact same thing with some other occasion (and they could always provoke some kind of attack from Gaza by killing a few people with no reason, as they have periodically done for the last 30 years).

And the reasoning for why now and not in 2003 is simple. In 2003, they had a much weaker international position - USA leadership was slightly less zionist, and the Arab states around them were much more belligerent towards Israel, and would have likely intervened directly at that time. Israel itself was also much weaker militarily - it has only increased its military spending in all the time since. And finally, a much smaller percentage of the Israeli population in 2003 was actively rooting for ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, especially since the population had been less exposed to the violent anti-Palestinian propaganda, and that propaganda itself had been less rabid.