I'm a Former Israeli Officer. AMA

I don't expect it, since historically Israel let humanitarian supplies in during wars. I also sincerely hope it will continue do that during this war.

IIRC (can't find sources right now) common practice has been to stop electricity for some time, then when international pressure increases supply it interminently. 

Yeah, I don't understand the water situation myself. I hear Hamas complaining about electricity, and not about water, so it seems to be fine for now.

About casualties: That's extremely difficult to answer in the best conditions, depends on the way Israel will do it, and requires actual expertise and classified information which I lack. I will try to give you the way I think about this question. 

The most similar war would be Operation Protective Edge, in 2014. Gazan forces were approximated at 25,000 people. According to Israel [1] in that war 2,125 Gazans were killed, of which 36% were civilians, 44% combatants, and 20% uncategorized males aged 16–50 (probably some are militants, some civilians and some opportunistic attackers who did not formally belong to any organization). Israel suffered 67 soldiers killed. However, the cities themselves were not invaded, and Hamas's vast bunker system was not directly confronted. Most palestinian casualties were from air strikes.

The most similar purely urban battle I can think about is the battle of Jenin (AFAIK the Israeli version of the events is the correct one). It consisted of 1000 Israeli soldiers vs 300 Palestinians, in a 40k people city. it ended with 23 Israeli soldiers killed, ~25-40 Palestinian militants killed, and 15-25 civilians killed. Direct multiplication would suggest 2,300 Israeli dead, 2,500 - 4,000 militants, and 1,500 -  2,500 civilians killed. In practice it would be more, since Gaza is better fortified and Hamas would not have anywhere to flee, unlike in Jenin.

An additional possibility is the usage of siege tatics. It seems siege directed against civilians is prohibited, but it's possible if you let civilians out. Therefore, if Israel manages to establish a humanitarian corridor to Egypt where Gazans can flee, without too many casualties for itself beyond the 1,000+ it already has. I find it very unlikely we'll have a siege without such corridor.

The truth will lie somewhere between airstrikes, urban fighting and siege. I don't know how Israel will combine the three, and it's probably being decided right now. We'll have to wait and see.

[1] I use Israel's figures because Hamas' are trivially unreliable, and UN Human Rights Council is an extremely biased body. For instance, after the recent attack on Israel, they held a moment of silence in memory of lives "lost in Palestinian territories and elsewhere".

It's an Iranian proxy war, and Iran is allied with Russia, but Russia likely isn't interested in this other than to the extent that it's an international distraction from Ukraine.

And Russia provided military hardware to groups it supported in Syria, and many of those groups were adjacent to terrorist groups - but not materially more so than the US's support of groups in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I slightly disagree with David here: Hamas representatives did thank some unnamed countries in addition to Iran in the last couple of days, which might hint to some Russian involvement and supply. However they don't want to be publicly associated with all this, so I imagine it's not too substantial.

I don't know about the war on terror more than what David said, sorry. It's a bit far from home, and I was young at the time and didn't follow it closely.

1. Thanks for your concern! Thankfully I've been impacted very little personally. I live in the center of Israel which "only" gets bombed once a day or so. My room is a bomb shelter (as is required by Isreali law to be available in every apartment), so I don't even have to get out of bed if there's an alarm during the night! 
   However two of my cousins are in combat, have enlisted as resrves and will go into the Gaza strip if it's invaded, so I'm worried for their safety.
2. In two word: Yes, exactly. 
   Israel's strategy since the Hamas took the strip over in 2007 has been to try and contain it, and keeping it weak by periodic, limited confrontations (the so called Mowing the Lawn doctorine), and trying to economically develop the strip in order to give Hamas incentives to avoid confrontation. While Hamas grew stronger, the general feeling was that the strategy works and the last 15 years were not that bad. 
   I think the genral concensus in Israel right now is that Hamas proved this strategy does not work, and we have to re- occupy the strip and topple Hamas's regime, then maybe try to establish a non- terrorist regime (maybe by some UN force or the Palestinial Authority). All that might not be possible. We'll have to live and see.
    

On #2, my personal view is that Israel has as much of an end-game strategy in Gaza as the US did after 9/11 invading Afghanistan - essentially none, but so much public pressure to overreact that they will go in and try to take over anyways.

Haha not that different from data science in other large organizations, but from time to time you do gruard shifts because it's the army. 

People try to make you do research on problems with next to no data, and there are literal human lives on the line, but you have to convince everyone it's not possible and you should focus on other, more approachable problems.

Let's take, for instance, a non classified problem: Automatically detecting people trying to sneak towards you. Seemingly easy: computer vision is a solved problem! However, sneaking tends to happen at night. While wearing camouflage (Out Of Distribution!). Sometimes your cameras are on a plane (OOD!) and/ or cover a large area (very small humans!). Also, there are only a few terrorist attacks a year, only some of them properly saved (until the one that literally kills a thousand people in one day), so almost no test data, not to mention training.

In conclusion: lots of fun, lots of action, but I enjoy civilian life better. It has better data!

I was a software developer in the Israeli military (not a data scientist), and I was part of a course constantly trains software developers for various units to use. 

The big picture is that the military is a huge organization, and there is a ton of room for software to improve everything. I can't talk about specific uses (just like I can't describe our tanks or whatever, sorry if that's what you're asking, and sorry I'm not giving the full picture), but even things like logistics or servers or healthcare have big teams working on them.

Also remember the military started a long time ago, when there weren't good off-the-shelf solutions for everything, and imagine how big are the companies that make many of the products that you (or orgs) use.

We have been keeping peace and nation building in the West Bank in the last fourty years or so. It's far from perfect, but the places didn't go up in flames in the last 20 years or so. We have less options than the US in Afghanistan so we learn through trial and error. Also the EU tends to send experts to try and help (whether they do is a diffferent question, for which I don't actually know the answer). 

The problem tends to be not that we don't know how to nation- build,  but that we don't want to. When we tried to build an actual Palestinian country in the 90's it kinda blew up in our face. The Palestinian Authority became a terror nation which we had to weaken a lot in Operation Defensive Shield back in 2002. It remained a weak, unelected government ever since (last elections were back at 2006, when Hamas started taking over). Nobody knows what will happen when the current president will die and it's A Problem.  

In conclusion: Yes, better that the US did but not very good objectively. We muddled through so far, so... fingers crossed?

What do you mean by "building capacity" in this context? (maybe my English isn't good enough, I didn't understand your question)

Wildly off the mark. I'll try and address your points one by one. 

1. Content warning: discussing slaugter of innocent jews, babies and elderly. Also the Holocaust. 
   How many babies and elderly Germans were killed during the Uprising of Warsaw Ghetto? Literally zero. It's a baseless comparison, making analogy between a last stand of people getting slaughtered against Nazi soldiers, and people who slaughtered hundreds of music festival attendees, beheading babies, taking babies as hostages, killing and burning babies (terrible censored image, proceed at your own risk),  and that's just scrolling my feed for a bit, there are more terrible atorcities commited yesterday, murder, kidnpping and rape.
   Conditions in Gaza are not good, but they are far from genocide. Population is growing rapidly. 
   Please actually read about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Wikipedia before saying such things.
2. We did not do anything unusual in the Gaza Strip lately, AFAIK. Even if we did, see point 1.
3. Recent Israeli protests were around reforms in the juidical system, seen as an overreach by the executive branch of Israeli govenment, and led by opposition leaders. It was postponed due to external threats. Both pro- and anti- reform protesters are proudly posting pictures of themselves enlisting.
4. See previous point
5. The protests stopped due to the war, where mainly Israeli working class were slaughtered. Who do you think is whose common enemy here?

I think we'll continue to get one messy equilibruim after the other, until we get something stable that's neither a two state solution nor a one state one. I don't know how it will look like.

As Yovel said, wildly off the mark.

Just one minor extra point - the poorer Israeli working class is mostly supportive of Netanyahu. It's the middle and upper classes who oppose him, who they see as corrupt.

Also the youth is generally more right wing in Israel, and the older generation more left wing.

In general you can't copy your model of politics from one country into another and expect it to accurately predict what's going on.

They did indeed stop going to reserve. However, basically 99% of them who were of relevant age enlisted now. It's not actually in our cultural DNA not to show up in emergency. Brothers In Arms also called for everyone to enlist immediately (Hebrew, sorry).

They only said that they would not come to reserve duty training, but have repeatedly said in case of a real emergency they will all show up immediately.

Nope. 

I don't think you will be able to get an actual solution in the next 10-20 years (barring SAGI- scale changes), since there's a sizable fraction of the palestinian population that wants literal jewish genocide and the destruction of Israel [1].

I do think Israeli government is planning to take over the Gaza Strip, so I imagine we'll get some kind of a different equilibrium after. But I can promise you nobody knows how what will happen in the day after. Some people are trying to promote solutions, such as the Palestinian Authority taking over the Strip, but nobody knows what's possible yet and much will change in the next weeks.

[1] Couldn't find a survey, but Hamas won elections handily in the Gaza Strip in 2006 and there were no other elections in the West Bank since because Hamas would win them too. Hamas's constitution literally called genocide of the jews until 2017 (in Hebrew, sorry), and is still an extremely anti semitic document that aims for the destruction of Israel.

I think the timing was a combination of ongoing repression and Hamas planning coming to fruition after years of planning and previous attempts - but that wasn't the proximate cause. The proximate cause for ordering the operation, I strongly suspect, was the US/Israel/Saudi peace talks that threatened Iran (Hamas's sponsor) with a regional coalition against them, and Netanyahu explicitly saying he was leaving the Palestinians out, and was hoping to neutralize the international support they had by making peace. The cause is particularly critical, in my view, because Israel's reaction has been exactly what Hamas and Iran hoped for, and seems likely to derail attempts at a Saudi peace deal.

We'll find out in the coming years what Egyptian intelligence knew, and likely find out how much the attack was directly orchestrated by Iran/Hezbollah via training, but one terrorism expert, Matt Levine of the Washington Institute, noted that the attack tactics were very clearly in line with Hezbollah's typical approach, rather than being similar to what Hamas has done in the past.

Historically wars did not negatively affect long term growth in Israel.
 

1. Not much, unless maybe Hezbolla joins in and starts seriously shelling us. It has accurate long range rockets which can do orders of manitude damage more than Hamas. However maybe in the long term we'll frogleap back? IDK.
2. Not much
3. I imagine opposition, since it's seen as a strategic failure by Nethanyahu policy, who was in charge in the last 15 years. However that's hard to predict, since it might give rise to far right forces who'll want to retaliate.

I was actually born in Netzarim in the Gaza strip, but my parents left when I was one month old for job reasons. I've not been there until 2005, when The Separation happened, all jews were transferred from the strip and jewish entrance was prohibited, after which I couldn't visit anymore.

There are 150,000 Palestinians from the West Bank who work in in Israel, and around 15,000 from the Gaza strip who used to do the same until last saturday. Israelis and Israeli Arabs mix all the time (for instance, I have some Israeli Arab friends), Palestinians less so. Access from and to the Gaza strip is very restricted, and in the West Bank settlements are separate. I live for a few years in the West Bank, and I talked to Palestinians when I met them during hiking and stuff. My dad and I actually saved a Palestinian goat that fell to a water canal during one of our hikes. It's unrelated to your question, just a funny anecdote I remembered while writing this.

We shouldn't have payed so much, but I don't know if it had a long term strategic impact. We definitely gave a lot of talent back to Hamas, who used it well.

Basically zero. My theory would rely on classified information, so I won't give it, sorry. I imagine there will be some kind of public commission of inquiry after the war. I'll try and remember to post a link to its conclusion for you when that happens.