they saw it as a last ditch effort. the worst case scenario for them was that gaza and the west bank are just forgotten about. that israel slowly digests those areas. house by house, so as not to set off any big alarms in the media, that people would eventually get tired of hearing the same (small stories). prior to october 7th a lot of people otherwise sympathetic to palestinians (including people that spoke out for them for many years like norman finklestein) had basically given up and stopped talking about the issue. launching an attack then forces their hand, gets people talking about it again and yes they knew the reaction would be disproportionate. but the wider goal seemed to be to try to undo those deals trump made where the arab countries that were still holding out with normalising relations with israel. that seemed to me to be the main purpose, to try to throw a spanner in the works of that.
Ireland