“Agamemnon: My dear Menelaus, why are you so chary of taking men’s lives? Did the Trojans treat you as handsomely as that when they stayed in your house? No; we are not going to leave a single one of them alive, down to the babies in their mothers’ wombs–not even they must live. The whole people must be wiped out of existence, and none be left to think of them and shed a tear.”
—-Homer, Iliad
MidEast literature abounds with these thug Epics known for their acts of grand-scale brutality. Recognized as the most ancient of literary texts, The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2150 – 1400 BCE), begins with its protagonist king, corrupted by power, incessantly abusing his people; killing men and assaulting women. Themes of slaughter, sacrifice, rivalry, disease, and natural disasters are described throughout his quest for eternal life.
The MidEast is certainly not by any means the sole proprietor of massive brutality in the World today or for thousands of years of humanities emergence as the dominant creative and controlling species on Earth. But the 5000 year record of the Mideast certainly shows waves of conflict as ethnic, religious, migrant groups sought to impose their will on MidEastern territories including conquests with episodes of massive violence. The existence of massive human violence has a recurring persistence labelled as democide. The current Hamas – Israel has both extreme brutality and two sides convinced of their opponents being an existential threat.
Growth of Existential Threats and Ensuing Violent Brutality
From the outset, the establishment of the State of Israel in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and subsequent administration had 5 serious flaws which continued to the 1947 official UN-partition of Palestine
1 – Britain, contrary to prior agreements with Palestinians, was allocating a undefined amount and unlocated portion of Palestine to new Jewish settlers:
2 – Britain did not consult with Palestinian officials about the the details of the Jewish settlement;
3 – Britain was allocating unknown portions of Palestine to 10% of Palestine’s population that was Jewish;
4 – Britain helped expedite European Jewish migration to Palestine especially due to their inaction on Nazi repression prior to WWII and then the Holocaust;
5- Britain trained and armed Jewish troops for WWII action but not Palestinians;
Palestinians regard international support weak and biased against them throughout the 1920 to 1948 period. The partition of Palestine is the ongoing existential threat Israel poses to Palestinians. 
The Washington Post has a chronology of the major incidents that produced the above maps of territorial control in Palestine. The bottom line is that international tribunals and numbing losses by “Arab Allies” have diminished Arab landholdings and rights to ever smaller and more subservient status.
And now Prime Minister Netanyahu with his extreme rightist cabinet ministers is working full time to create the Ben Gurion Zionist vision – a Judea completely in Israeli control – as the NYTimes describes it – For Palestinians, the Future Is Being Bulldozed.
So with an existential conflict Hamas has resorted to desperation means. These are hardly a surprise; but the chosen Hamas Havoc descended upon both Israelis and 2million civilian Palestinians without their consent or control has epic consequences that might even startle Agamemnon.