Gaza's rulers want Israel to embark on a ground incursion, a move Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhau has been desperate to avoid. Hamas' goal is to besiege Israel with rapid rocket fire, target its infrastructure, frighten the Israeli public, and wear down the defense establishment until it has no other option but to invade.
While Hamas' shorter-range rockets, aimed at dense population centers along the Gaza border, are capable of causing civilian casualties and damage with fairly decent accuracy, its mid and long-range projectiles – which can reach up to 200 km – are less accurate.
Hamas' aim is to kill and injure civilians, but the chances of such occurring with the long-range rockets are low. It therefore targets its projectiles at both civilian populations and at significant Israeli installations, such as power plants, major army bases, and the airport, for the added bonus of damaging Israel's infrastructure.
At least 7-10 rockets were fired at Tel Aviv on Saturday night, preceded by a Hamas warning that a barrage would occur at 9 P.M. exactly to mimic the IDF's 'knock on roof' policy warning civilians to seek shelter. The rockets were fired seven minutes later, with no hits and no casualties, and the city resumed its schedule of weekend activities within minutes. Such a heavy barrage has not been recorded in Tel Aviv since the Iraqi scuds of 1991, over a 21 day period, and the Egyptian bombing of the Central Bus Station in 1948.
The likelihood of a single civilian who does not seek shelter being struck by an M-75 or the Syrian-made M-302 is one in several millions. The eight Iron Dome defense batteries deployed across Israel have had about an 80- 90 percent success rate in intercepting the rockets fired so far during this operation, but they cannot stop fragments, especially the rocket engine, from surging to the ground after mid-air explosions. The danger to human life from these projectiles, therefore, is more likely to be caused by fallen shrapnel from an intercepted rocket or from accidents while seeking shelter in a panic.
A ground incursion would enable Hamas' underground city, with its hidden headquarters, to secure fatal blows to a high number of Israeli soldiers. An invasion would mean further destruction of its rocket cache, but Hamas is more concerned with killing and maiming Israeli soldiers, its "victory photo" in this war. With a significantly higher supply of short-range rockets, it will still be able to aim at civilians close to its border, even as its longer and mid-range missiles are destroyed.
At the beginning of the war, there were approximately 10,000 rockets in the Gaza arsenal, about 1/3 controlled by Islamic Jihad and the rest by Hamas. Of these, only some 200 M-75 (range of 75 km) and fewer than 50 M-302s (range of up to 200km) remain – without Syria's support, the stock of these long-range missiles is preciously dwindling. Hamas fires these mid and long-range missiles strategically, at peak morning and evening hours to maximize its chances of inflicting casualties and frightening the general public, but it knows that the supply will soon be exhausted, with no benefactor to replenish it. The only way for Israel to wipe out the thousands of shorter-range rockets still in cache and aimed at its south, is to go in on the ground to locate and demolish them.
Hamas and the Islamic Jihad have fired nearly 700 rockets at Israel from south to north over the course of five days - at a rate of about one per 10 minutes, according to Israel Defense Forces' figures – seriously wounding two people. Israel has struck almost 1200 Gaza targets – a rate of one per 4.5 minutes – killing nearly 130 people and causing about 800 injuries, most of them women and children. During the eight-day Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, Israel attacked 1,500 sites in Gaza and killed 167 – close to the same number in nearly double the time.
Hamas hides its weapons under civilian institutions, such as schools and orphanages, hospitals and mosques. It tells Gazans to ignore Israel's warnings to abandon buildings targeted for air strikes, and orders them to stand on the rooftops as human shields. Its goal is not to reduce the number of casualties among its own people, but to increase the number of fatalities on both the Israeli side and on its own, as a propaganda tool to draw sympathy for its losses.
Smoke rises in Gaza after an Israeli strike. Photo by AFP.
Israel has limited human and signet intelligence in the Gaza Strip, sufficient enough to pinpoint a good deal of targets to demolish, but not all. Israel underestimated, for instance, the number of long range M-302s which had made their way into the Gaza arsenal – had Israel known, these would have the first and primary targets in its opening strikes, as they were in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2012.
The Israeli defense establishment has been putting off invasion for five days, but has declared readiness to do so, saying that the operation would continue until Gaza's arsenal was destroyed and quiet restored to the citizens of Israel. A ground incursion would be aimed at searching from house to house to locate the rocket depots and the underground launchers, and would provide Israeli forces with updated information via interrogation of prisoners – but at the cost of human life.
Netanyahu has said that a cease-fire is not on the agenda, but there are some indications already that secret encounters with U.S., Egypt, Qatar and the UN to broker an end to hostilities are in place behind the scenes. The Palestinian Authority, meanwhile, has drafted a United Nations resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire, but as the wording mentions only Israeli hostilities, and not Hamas rocket-fire, there is little chance the U.S. will approve.
With no end to Hamas' barrage of rockets and Israel's aerial operation, a ground incursion seems inevitable. One can only hope that the Israeli government has learned its lessons from the failures in Lebanon and in the 2009 Gaza war, and acts swiftly in the next infantry campaign to minimize the loss of both Palestinian and Israeli lives.
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