Anyone Care to Estimate

exactly how bad the Middle East is about to get now that Palestinians are promising to make Israel feel like it's being struck by an earthquake while Israel is saying it may take out all of Hamas and that it isn't necessarily inclined to keep Yassir Arafat's name off the list?

Just in a very practical sense, let me point out that the Hamas spiritual leader just assassinated and Arafat are both men of advanced age. They've already outlived what unfortunately tends to an early death statistical age for Muslim males. Neither was/is likely to last all that much longer on the planet.

But the intentional murder of these men (one already carried out) is going to incite far more outrage and violence than simply allowing them to die from old age. Arafat has been so drastically minimized that the only way to bring him out of exile would be to make a serious attempt on his life. Whether he survived the attempt or not, he gains a much greater status of martyr than he has now.