Monday, just after morning prayers, Israel launched an air strike assassination attempt against Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. It was successful:

I wholeheartedly share the ambitions of those Palestinians who seek a just peace, with an equal right to exist along side Israel. I wholeheartedly disagree with the methods used by secular Palestinian terrorists who share those ambitions. But Hamas is a very different brand of psycho.

Hamas is just reprehensible in general. They seek an Islamist theocracy, encompassing all of historic Palestine and treating the country's Jews as second class citizens -- at best.

That being said, this air strike is an outrageous escalation. It will not help stop terrorism. It will increase terrorism.

So why did Israel do it?

Well, as has been widely reported, Israel is building a separation wall along the western front of the West Bank. Much less well known is that many Israeli hardliners also want to build an eastern wall dividing Palestinian towns and cities from settlements on the West Bank's eastern edge -- and annexing vast swaths of land at the same time.

An escalating conflict would provide Israeli hardliners with just the pretext they need to achieve their goal of a wholly enclosed apartheid state.