The war between Israel and Hamas is really hotting up. Hamas fired 100 rockets at Israel today, some of them reaching as far as Jerusalem and Caesarea, which is south of Haifa. One rocket hit a house in North Jerusalem! Wow!
Hamas has hundreds of Syrian-made M-302 Khaibar missiles. It is a pretty impressive weapon. Hezbollah was using them in the last Lebanon War. It has a very long range, but the main problem with it is it is not very accurate.
These missiles probably came from Syria to Iran and then via sea to Gaza. An Iranian ship with these smuggled aboard was found by Israel offshore Gaza, and the importation of the rockets was foiled. However some must have gotten through somehow as Hamas seems to have a large store of these things. A number of Hezbollah operatives have somehow made their way into Gaza, and they have been helping Hamas to redesign these missiles so they work better for their Gaza mission. Interesting that Sunni Islamist Hamas works so close with Shia Iran and Hezbollah. Islamic Jihad is particularly close to Iran and one of its leaders even converted to Shiism a while back.
In addition to the sea attack, Hamas made another attempt to infiltrate Israel by tunneling in via land under the border between Gaza and Israel. Israel knew nothing of this attempt until there was a massive explosion underground in an IDF base near Gaza. This caused all Hell to break loose on the base. I don’t have any further information on this infiltration attempt.
Israel’s Iron Dome shot down a number of these rockets, but some of them got through anyway. ~250 rockets have been fired at Israel by Hamas in the past few days. That sounds pretty terrifying, but those rockets are mostly just scary; they do little damage. They have only damaged a few cars and buildings, and I can only count four Israelis wounded so far, and most of the wounds appear to be light injuries.
Israel is blasting away at Hamas facilities in Gaza, and they have also attacked and killed some top Hamas officials, including the head of Hamas Sea Reconnaissance Division. Most of the buildings hit were part of the Hamas infrastructure, and in general they were abandoned when they were hit. Several Hamas fighters were killed in an attack on a vehicle they were driving. Most IDF hits are coming from the air, but there has been some shelling from the sea too. Recently, Israel has accused Hamas of using human shields. I do not have details on that one.
In the West Bank and in the Galilee Triangle where most of Israel’s Arabs live, rioting has been going on for a few days now. Israeli Arabs are generally pretty quiescent, but now and again they do get riled up.
The incident that set off the rioting was the kidnapping and torture murder of a 16 year old Palestinian boy from Jerusalem by six Jewish freelance terrorists. The boy was forced into a car in Jerusalem, quickly knocked out with a blow to the head, and then transported to Jerusalem Forest where he was forced to drink gasoline, thrown on the ground and then set on fire.
The fire ignited the gasoline in his stomach and he ended up blowing up and igniting from the inside of his body outwards. Still alive when he was dropped off, the boy was burned alive. Initial reports said he was gay and was a victim of an Arab honor killing, but that report was in error. 3 of the Jews have confessed. Most Israelis have been very outspoken in their condemnation of this attack, and rabbis have said it is against Judaism. Top government ministers paid a visit to the home of the boy’s parents.
This does set Israeli Jews apart from their Arab enemies. The Jews condemn genuine Jewish terrorism against civilians, even giving solace to survivors, while Palestinians seem mostly to cheer on these sort of attacks when Israeli Jews are the victims. It is a difference in civilizational structures – between an Arabized one and a Europeanized one.
The riots have been brutal. An American boy with dual Palestinian-American citizenship was badly beaten by the IDF. He was throwing stones at soldiers and resisted arrest, but photos of the beating look gruesome, and it seems excessive. In Israel, gangs of Jewish terrorists formed blockades and stopped cards, looking at identity documents. Arabs were pulled out of their cars and beaten. In the Arab Triangle in Israel’s north, gangs of Arab terrorists did the same thing, forming roadblocks and stopping cars, pulling out any Jews and beating them. It is starting to look like a tribal or nationalist war.
The incident that set off this whole mess was the kidnapping of three Orthodox Jewish teenagers hitchhiking near Hebron. One had dual American-Israeli citizenship. A small two man Hamas cell picked them up and subdued them somehow. One of the teens still had his cellphone, and he managed to call 911 and say they were being kidnapped. The captors saw him do that and figured the gig was up. The teens were quickly shot dead. The phone was still on, and the killers could be heard laughing and joking after they shot the teens dead.
This was probably not the intention of the kidnapping. They were probably taken as hostages to trade for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. That plan was thought to have been ruined when the boy called 911, but actually the police thought it was a prank call and crucial hours were lost early in the search. The teens’ cellphones were quickly disposed of (smart move), and the kidnap car was set on fire (smart move #2). The two kidnappers, who were quickly named, were Hamas members from the seething Hebron area. They have since vanished off the face of the Earth without a trace. Later a third man was named as an accomplice.
Israel immediately took off on a mad spree of arrests all through the West Bank in order to “dismantle Hamas’ infrastructure.” ~300 people were arrested, 80% of them Hamas members. All were held without charges because honestly I doubt if they are guilty of any crime other than membership in Hamas, and I doubt if that is illegal. Prime Minister Netanyahu declared war on Hamas and vowed to destroy the organization. As part of the war on Hamas, Israel began bombing buildings in Gaza.
But these moves were not appropriate as honestly Hamas was innocent of the killing of the boys. The kidnapping was apparently the work of a small rogue group in the Hebron area, perhaps with a cell structure, and none of Hamas’ leadership knew anything about this group or its plans. So Israel declared an organization guilty of a crime they were innocent of. Israel was probably driven to do something by popular calls for revenge after the killings of the teens.
But it was a stupid move to declare war on Hamas due to a crime they knew nothing of. Sure, vengeance was sated, but look at the conflagration it has set off.
Israel has been trying to get General Sisi, the Egyptian leader, to broker a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, but it is not working. Hamas has made excessive demands of Egypt, including a reopening of the Gaza tunnels that Egypt closed down and opening up travel between Gaza and Egypt. Hamas wants to get those tunnels working again so they can smuggle in goods, weaponry and men. They want the border open so they can connect with a powerful jihadi movement that is very active among the Bedouin tribes of the Sinai. Sisi hates the Sinai jihadis and regards the tunnels as a gigantic headache.
Much of the part of Sinai just to the east of Gaza along the coast is a population center that is now crowded with seething, radicalized Palestinians from Gaza. Another reason Sisi does not want to work with Hamas is because Gaza is the Palestinian branch of the radical Muslim Brotherhood. Sisi and his generals overthrew the MB government in Egypt, and the state has regarded the MB as the enemy dating all the way back to the Nasser days when he executed many of them.
When the radical MB was in power in Egypt, they formed a tight alliance with Hamas, and there were even plans to chop off a part of the Sinai next to Gaza about twice the size of Gaza itself and give it to the Palestinians for some sort of a state. They could either connect it with Gaza and declare the whole thing independent or they could declare the Sinai section independent.
