Hamas is waging a war of attrition, pushing to maximize casualties on both sides

Hamas is waging a war of attrition on Israel. Isolated from its former allies and benefactors, its smuggling tunnels flooded, Hamas has little to lose and much to gain by dragging Israel into all-out war.

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.

Israelis and Palestinians have forgotten how this war began

The Israel Air Force has attacked more than 500 targets in the Gaza Strip in the last 48 hours, a trade of barbs with the near equal number of rockets fired at Israel, 30 of them long range to Tel Aviv northward, since the operation began.

As Palestinians and Israelis take cover on either side of the Gaza border, it seems both have forgotten why this war started in the first place.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tiptoed into this operation last week carefully and hesitatingly, knowing neither side was interested in an escalation. Netanyahu knew that an all-out war would end not only in bloodshed, but in further international isolation for Israel.

When his foreign minister and faction partner Avigdor Lieberman publicly split with him over their policy in Gaza, Netanyahu was forced into action: a ruthless aerial campaign over the Strip to prove Israel's steadfastness in responding to rocket fire. This was a reality even right-wing Netanyahu wanted to avoid, but the barrage of rockets and the political pressure left him little choice.

As the operation enters its third day, Netanyahu is helpless to the fact that a ground incursion may be next on the agenda. This is certainly Hamas' aspiration, seen by its naval incursion Tuesday and subsequent failed attempt on Wednesday.

A ground incursion would mean fewer losses for Gaza, as the battles pinpoint on its own territory where it can fight with more control using weapons it has en masse that are easier to attain than the long-range missiles no longer readily available from its former benefactors in Iran. This would also give it a chance to wipe out Israeli forces in a way impossible under aerial strike – Hamas has already fired anti-aircraft missiles at Israeli jets, but its arsenal is limited and cannot be wasted for that effort.

Netanyahu said at the outset that neither Israel nor Hamas wanted escalation. The fragile Palestinian unity pact served for both as a deterrent. Hamas is weaker than ever, abandoned by Syria and Iran, and humiliated by Egypt, which has outlawed its allied Muslim Brotherhood and acted brutally to destroy the smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Sinai. Hamas' call to the Palestinian Authority was desperate, a last-ditch attempt to hover above water and maintain political and military legitimacy while hobbling on its last leg.

Israel recognized this weakness and sought to prevent reconciliation, in order to keep Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority clean and willing to concede to the conditions neither side managed to agree on in the exhausting nine months of failed peace negotiations.

Egypt's efforts to stymie Hamas' terrorist activities have been even significantly harsher than Israel's: it has repeatedly flooded its tunnels with sewage and destroyed hundreds of homes in the vicinity, damming not only Hamas' military capabilities but also its economic income, swallowing the profits that the Islamic organization has made over the years in illegal imports and taxation.

In the recent escalation, Hamas has suffered more losses in terms of strikes and casualties than Israel – hundreds of aerial attacks and more than two dozen killed – but has scored a victory with its surprise launching of at least three M-302 missiles, the longest-range projectiles in its cache, capable of reaching 200 km when lightly loaded and 150 km with a significant amount of warheads (145 kg). Its accuracy rate is within one kilometer, like its mid-range counterpart, the M-75 (similar to the Iranian Fajr). With just around 50 of these M-302s left in its arsenal, Hamas cannot afford to fire them at Israel with abandon.

These long-range missiles have already hit near Haifa's power station, and in Hadera – near the country's main power plant, and the only Israeli city to have absorbed missile attacks from both Gaza and from Lebanon in 2006. Hamas has also fired its mid-range missiles at Dimona, a mere few kilometers from Israel's nuclear reactor.

Its attacks are not indiscriminate: less targeted perhaps within Tel Aviv, to scare the public with albeit marginally inaccurate launches, but precise in attempt to demolish the infrastructure at energy and army bases. In addition to the few dozen M-302 remaining, there are a few hundred more M-75 mid-range projectiles in the Gaza cache, most in Hamas' cache and the rest overseen by the Islamic Jihad.

As the battle between Gaza and Israel escalates, the highways of Israel are now quiet, a far cry from the boiling Arab and Jewish riots over the kidnappings and deaths of the three Israeli and one Palestinian teens last week. Details of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir's murder, apparently at the hands of Jewish extremists, are still under gag order, but the anger and calls for revenge have subsided into oblivion. If nothing, the Gaza front has calmed the embers in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

One should remember, however, that these were the embers that sparked the Gaza escalation. Without the rockets and the aerial strikes, media discourse and public outrage would still be focused on sectarian divides and a third intifada, and a demand to hunt the perpetrators of all four teenaged deaths, who have still not been verified or tried – and in the case of the West Bank kidnapping, have not even been found.

The cost of civilian life ranks high on Netanyahu's agenda, following the lessons of the previous Gaza wars in 2012 and 2009, and especially in Lebanon in 2006; less so in Gaza, where Hamas has stored caches of long-range missiles under civilian buildings, inviting Israeli strikes. Hamas has little to lose these days; its political, military and economic stability is at stake and it will not survive without the reinstated support of Iran or Syria, or alternately, a strong Palestinian Authority that recognizes it demands and bounds.

Fears of a Jewish-Arab backlash within the bounds of recognized Israel have been put on the back-burner for now, as have the prospects of renewed peace negotiations, while Israel and Gaza focus on the next mission at hand: destroying the other's resolve and securing international support.

Expected but not surprised: Hamas hits Tel Aviv

Israel's mostly complacent public in the center of the country is at war again, but is likely to forget this by the time the next cease-fire is declared within a few days or at worst, weeks. For most Israelis, the threat from the south –as the fronts on the east and the north - is a mere inconvenience, and proof that peace with the Palestinians is impossible.

Hamas to them is an illegitimate anti-Israeli entity whose revenge can be harsh, but only brief, while the recognized Palestinian Authority is the force that must be reckoned and reasoned with, though there too, most Israelis – despite the overwhelming number in favor of a two-state solution - see no partner, regardless of its overtures. This war is to the Israeli public another brief disturbance and another nail in the coffin of the peace process.
War in Israel since the second intifada, for most of the country's secular and moderately religious society, is a passing affair: while the south sustains massive hits on a daily and weekly basis, as East Jerusalem and the West Bank burn and Gaza is ruthlessly attacked, residents in the center of the country run fearfully with the spontaneous sirens and return to normalcy just as quickly. The same is true of the south, but the rate and frequency with which they are attacked has forced them into a more sober reality.

This month's conflict was spurred in the West Bank, with the kidnap and murder of three Israeli teens, and the subsequent revenge attack of a Palestinian of the same age. These events, which broiled the extreme right-wing in Jerusalem and the parts of West Bank, have taken a back burner now that Gaza has returned to the map.

As the rocket barrages burst into the center of Israel on Tuesday, an inconclusive five-star and star-studded affair with war on its agenda took place: Haaretz's acclaimed Israel's Conference on Peace. And there were even fireworks to punctuate the event.

Dozens of rockets were fired at Israel over the course of the evening – one over Tel Aviv in early evening and at least seven more in the center of the country after dark, including four identified in Jerusalem and a siren near the main power plant in Caesarea for the first time since the 2006 war in Lebanon - each met with slight alarm from residents and a quick return to business as usual. The southern city of Ashdod, once an anomaly and now a regular target, sustained multiple direct hits as well.

As Israel's leading politicians and security experts – Tzipi Livni, Yuval Diskin, Shimon Peres and more - rubbed elbows with its leftist elite and journalists at the conference in Tel Aviv, jihadists in the Gaza Strip took the opportunity to fire at the country's commercial and population center, intercepted just south of the city by the Iron Dome defense system. Participants of the peace conference learned of the sirens minutes later, and crowded the basement lobby to reassure friends and family that they were okay, and oh, how ironic.

As these center communities panicked, unused to rockets like their southern neighbors are,the Israel Air Force continued its attacks on militants in the Gaza Strip, killing at least nine throughout the day.

A short hour after the first Tel Aviv siren and before the nighttime barrage, Barack Obama's special assistant on the Middle East wrapped up Haaretz's peace conference calling on Israel to defend itself but to act responsibly, recalling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's own urging the evening before.
This call by Netanyahu was made Sunday night, just hours before Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman took his Yisrael Beiteinu faction out of its alliance with Likud - a clear prompt tothe prime minister to rethink his strategy and political support, and order the IDF to prepare for a ground incursion - a move he had adamantly tried to prevent, and which he agreed to in the wake of the political splint.

Hamas claimed responsibility for the four rockets fired at Jerusalem and the two at Tel Aviv on Tuesday night, declaring them M 75 missiles, the Islamist organization's greatest weapon so far. An M 75 missile is designed to reach that many kilometers when loaded with the strongest amount of explosives (40kg) it can handle, but can go as far as 90-100 km if packed lighter. A more powerful rocket was launched later that night against Hadera, less than two kilometers from Israel's main power plant. This is M-302, originally a Chinese artillery rocket modified and upgraded by Syria sold to Iran and smuggled to Gaza. It weighs 600kg with a war head of up to 175 though unguided and inaccurate it can reach up to 200km.

Israel estimates that around 400 of these missiles existed in the Gaza arsenal, split between Hamas and the Islamic Jihad before the night's barrage: a dozen were fired over the course of Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, most of them either intercepted by the Iron Dome or left to hit open spaces. It is clear that without Iran's funding and supplies, the Islamist organization does not have a sufficient number in its cache to fire these treasures at an indiscriminate rate. With its limited supply, neither Hamas nor other militants will part quickly with these missiles. It is using these weapons as sparingly as possible.

The situation in Israel today - kidnappings, murders, and rockets rampant -is reminiscent of both October 2000, the critical moments before the second intifada, and November 2012, when Tel Aviv residents peeked out from their bubble for the first time since the intifada and realized that enemy missiles could reach their neighborhoods and force them to rethink just how relaxed to be in the midst of war on the southern front. For Tel Aviv and Haifa residents, scurrying from such far-range explosives-loaded missiles is a far-gone memory, last seen in 1991 during the Gulf War.

Hamas and its militant compatriots – jihadists which negate its rule - in the Gaza Strip know that 32 percent of the population in Jerusalem, mostly in its east and north, are Muslim. It has and will continue to aim its weapons away from this divisive community, focusing the large rockets on the Judean hills where the main Israel Defense Forces base in the region is located. Its attacks on Tel Aviv are far more indiscriminate: the residential center of this main city is as fair a target as a school in its north or a club in its south.

Israelis will continue to balk at the sound of the sirens and return to agenda immediately, as the south takes the real hits. Tel Aviv is not Sderot. Hamas and the Islamic Jihad have a limited arsenal they are unlikely to waste in a single night, and a truce between the sides is likely to be achieved before any real damage on the Israeli center can be achieved.

Israelis should be alert now, but not alarmed. They know now where to run in case of missiles – their municipalities have been told to prepare – and they know to heed the advice of local experts. They also know that just as Israel wants to avoid escalation, so does Hamas does not want an escalation – it has more to lose than Israel.

The recent days' attacks are a threat in response to threat, a mutual trade between Gaza and Israel. The Palestinian unity pact is on fragile hold and thus Hamas' security and support is waning. Both Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas recognize the hubris in this latest round of war games, and Hamas on its end is well aware too.

The Gaza front opened as Israel and the Palestinian Authority were engaged in solving the crisis of the four kidnapped teens'; From the start, Netanyahu's aim was to prove to Abbas that Hamas is indeed a terrorist group unworthy of a unity pact. In this sense, he has won – Abbas cannot sanctify his unity with Hamas as long as the rockets continue. And the Israeli public will continue to refuse its ever possibility – and thus a chance of an inclusive peace agreement with the two Palestinian territories - as long as the attacks continue on both fronts.

The cycle of violence and revenge continue.

Israel's fear of abandoning Jewish morality will backfire

Four days after a Palestinian teenager was kidnapped outside of an East Jerusalem mosque and burned alive in a forest nearby, the Shin Bet revealed partial details of its investigation: Six Israeli Jews believed to belong to an ad-hoc extremist group have been arrested.

A cloud of secrecy has hovered over the police investigation, but suspicions that Jewish rightists were behind the murder was clear from the start, in both the Israeli and Palestinian public. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself condemned the murder immediately after on the basis of it having been the act of Jewish extremists, even as a strict gag order kept the details of the probe undercover.

Rumors began flying as the police kept mum that 16-year-old Mohammed Abu-Khdeir was killed by members of his own family over unsubstantiated claims that he was a homosexual, or by a rival clan for some yet-to-be-determined settling of debts. The teenager's family insisted that this was not an honor killing and that their son was a good student with no enemies. The false claims continued to circulate, with the Israeli right-wing eager to prove to themselves and to others that Jews could not be behind such a heinous crime.

There was little doubt that this was the work of Jewish terrorists. The abduction was carried out less than 12 hours after the three Israeli teenagers abducted and murdered three weeks before were laid to rest and amidst rampant demonstrations of Israeli Jews in Jerusalem calling for blood and death to the Arabs.

The gag order was sealed again Sunday just hours after the initial details of the investigation were revealed, at the behest of the Shin Bet, which is holding the Jewish suspects in custody. One small piece of information managed to filter through before the file was removed from public information, however: that the same six suspects were linked to the abduction attempt of a 9-year-old boy in the same East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shoafat just a day before Abu Kheidar's kidnap and grisly murder.

Netanyahu again condemned the murder, in his first press conference in more than two years. "Israel does not differentiate between terror," Netanyahu said, vowing to crack down on Jewish extremists with the same vigorousness Israel uses against Palestinians. "As I condemn the calls of death to Arabs, I condemn calls of death to Jews." In the same breath, he followed by declaring that what differentiates Israel from its neighbors is that the latter welcomes murderers and terrorists and names streets and squares after them.

Netanyahu's weakened condemnation, to play into the Israeli sentiment that Jews could not be responsible for such an act, were followed by a harsher and more surprising remark by his right-wing Economy Minister, Naftali Bennett, who proposed subjecting Jewish terrorists to the same legal retributions accorded to Palestinians convicted of security offenses.

The prime minister's quick clarification of Jews' moral superiority will do little to douse the flames engulfing Israel, nor will the gag order reinstated on the investigation, leaving open conspiracy theories and unsettled suspicions.



Arab rioters have taken to the streets of Israel, from Wadi Ara to the highways leading to wealthy suburbs in both north and south, hurling firebombs and stones, and lighting tires aflame. Israel's highways are beginning to look like the West Bank or East Jerusalem. The riots subsided briefly on Sunday morning and resumed at full force on Sunday evening, following news of the arrest. Police were forced to shut down major thoroughfares over the course of the demonstration, as the rioters targeted cars entering the Jewish neighborhoods. Nearly 200 demonstrators were arrested in a single day of clashes.

Jewish claims to moral superiority must not be taken at face value. Extremists are capable of and have carried out far more extensive massacres over the course of Israel's recent history. Baruch Goldstein's murder of 29 Palestinians in Hebron is the most well-known of these attacks, but many other examples exist: the Bat Ayin underground's plan to wipe out a Palestinian girls' school, deserted soldier Eden Natan-Zada's murder of four innocent Arab passengers on a bus in Shfaram, contractor Asher Weisgan's targeted shootout of four of his Palestinian workers, the arson of a home in Sinjil which trapped and killed an entire Palestinian family.

The Israeli Arab demonstrations and concurrent clashes with police have drawn the war between Jews and Arab across the Green Line, into the affluent suburbs of secular Israel. Their riots were preceded by a venomous popular campaign among right-wing Israelis – not even those considered extreme - calling for bloody revenge over the murder of the three Israeli teens. What will stop these Jewish revenge-seekers from countering their Arab counterparts in Israel in a bloody face-off?

Those who are capable of burning a teenager alive are capable of taking up arms against their enemy masses in the Israeli Arab sector. The Israeli government, however, is not capable of issuing a firm declaration without forgiving society for its Jewish morality in comparison with its neighbors and the "lone" extremists responsible for these attacks.

Unless Netanyahu acts on his pledge of cracking down on the right-wing violence, his claims of Jewish superiority will backfire and leave Israel not only in further isolation but in a bloody sectarian war.

Israel should take West Bank kidnapping as chance for peace, not war

Police evacuating Arabs from riots in Jerusalem / Olivier Fittousi, Haaretz

Soon after the three kidnapped teens were laid to rest side-by-side in an emotional funeral attended by tens of thousands of mourners, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's security cabinet of senior ministers convened for the second time in 24 hours to determine its response to the attack and to the barrage of rockets that have been lobbied at southern Israel in the weeks that followed.

Just a few kilometers away, in the center of Jerusalem, dozens of right-wing Israelis gathered not for a vigil, but to cast their anger and frustration on any Palestinian they could find. They rampaged through the streets shouting racist slogans, hurling rocks and firing pepper spray, demanding "revenge" and death to the Arabs.

Five Palestinians were wounded and some 50 rioters were detained. The mob on Tuesday night carried the spirit of their comrades who chose a similar course of action the evening before, when it emerged that security forces has found the boys' bodies, 19 days after they were whisked away from a hitchhiking stand in the West Bank.

Before the meeting, Netanyahu and his defense minister, Moshe Ya'alon, lay out to the public the three tasks facing Israel's defense establishment: first, to find the abductors and all accomplices; second to destroy Hamas' infrastructure and membership in the West Bank; and third, "to expand the operation as far as required" to wipe out the military capabilities of the ruling Islamist organization in the Gaza Strip.

"We will not rest and we will not relax until we have reached every last one of them. It doesn't matter where they try to hide. We will reach them all," Netanyahu said.

Despite Netanyahu's harsh words, the cabinet is torn on how to respond, particularly on whether to turn its energies also on Gaza rather than just focusing its search on Hamas in the West Bank. The majority in cabinet fears that a violent circle will result in an all-out war, which both sides are eager to avoid.

Israel has struck Gaza targets by the dozens in the last few weeks, in response to the near hundred rockets fired at Israel, with the goal of reaching Hamas' operational ranks in the coastal territory.

Hamas is used to these reprisals, however, and most of its senior commanders have already taken refuge underground. The only exposed targets at this point are the low-level militants doing the footwork in Gaza and the weapons warehouses they man.

Ya'alon, for his part, while showing caution on the military front, is keeping up his image as a shoot-from-the-hip right-wing politician, proposing that a new settlement be created in response to the kidnapping in memory of the three teens. His suggestion is no less provocative than the activities of the vigilante rightists roaming the streets of Jerusalem seeking revenge with their eyes closed.

In the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority is considering its next move just as carefully. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas held out an olive branch in vulnerable hands three weeks ago when he told a forum of Arab foreign ministers, in their native language at a summit in Jeddah, that he condemned the kidnapping and resolved to find the perpetrators.

Abbas plans to approach the international community in a plea to halt Israeli military moves, fearing the domino effect it will create: a popular uprising, a third intifada, and a renewal of unrest in the West Bank that hasn't been felt in nearly a decade.

Hundreds of homes have been overturned and nearly 500 Palestinians have been arrested since Israel embarked on its operation to find the boys and their kidnappers. Palestinians will not tolerate the overnight raids and incursions much longer; the majority, unaffiliated with Hamas, wants to live in a state of stability, to escape the sense of occupation, without fear for family, property and peace of mind.

The defense establishment must focus on pinpointing the terrorists and their accomplices, but need not turn the West Bank upside down in its search – and most certainly should not open a wide-scale operation in the Gaza Strip. Such a move will only escalate enmity on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides.

More air strikes on Gaza will be met with multiple rocket barrages on the south; extensive raids in the West Bank will find its match with a populist response from angry young Palestinians; that uprising will spur further violence from the right-wing Israeli extremists. And so forth and so forth. There will be no end to the cycle.

The deadline for renewing peace talks expired in late April, but such dates are flexible; Israel and the Palestinians have been going at this process for 21 years. Israel should take the opportunity to see Abbas and his Palestinian Authority as a partner for peace, and together form a true partnership to wipe out the extremism within both Israel and the West Bank.

Israel is intent on destroying Abbas' unity agreement with Hamas. Attacking the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will only strengthen their fraternity. Israel now has the chance to fortify a bond with Abbas that will ensure security on both sides of the Jordan River, for the Israelis and the Palestinians on each side. Abbas has shown he is ready. Netanyahu must do the same.

With bodies of kidnapped teens found, Israel is now waging war against Hamas

It was clear to the Shin Bet from the very beginning of its search for the three abducted teenagers and their kidnappers in the West Bank that there was little chance of finding the boys alive.

The investigation began seven hours after the boys were kidnapped, due to the failure of the police to operate accordingly, to respond to one of the boys' desperate plea for help or to track the call in the hours that followed.

The Shin Bet relied on two means of intelligence and two spheres of search over the last 19 days: They employed human intelligence (Shin Bet case officers, sources in the field, using agents and collaborators, and forensic evidence) and signet (wiretapping and analysis of data). Based on the lack of forensics aside from the burnt car abandoned by the kidnappers, and to the fact that there were no claims of responsibility from any individual or organization, the Shin Bet did not have even the slightest evidence to assess that the three were still alive.

Based on that assessment, the Shin Bet opened two spheres of search: one to locate the kidnappers and the other to locate the teens – or their bodies.

Security forces raided Hebron, near the site of the kidnapping and the believed home base of the kidnappers. The Shin Bet had listed Marwan Kwasame and Amar Abu Aysha as prime suspects within three days of the kidnapping, after learning that the two Hamas militants had disappeared just hours before the incident. Both have a history of militancy in the Hebron area, and both have been arrested in Israel in the past.

The Israeli forces turned homes upside down by the dozen, arrested hundreds of Hamas operatives and suspects, and searched in the river valleys and farms surrounding the area for some evidence of eithers' whereabouts.

The Shin Bet managed to narrow down the huge swath of land near Hebron to the exact spot where they found the boys' bodies at about 6 P.M. on Monday evening, but they still have not managed to track down the kidnappers. The manhunt is still underway, and the Shin Bet is certain it will manage to locate them. It believes that the kidnappers have not managed to escape the West Bank or even find refuge in the northern part of the territory, and estimates that they are still hiding in the Hebron area.

Two main questions, aside from the kidnappers' location, remain. The first is whether the kidnappers intended all along to abduct and kill, or whether they panicked in their attempt to bargain their hostages for a prisoner release and shot their victims in the head after one of the boys made a desperate call to the police hotline and whispered, "They kidnapped me."

As neither Kwasame nor Abu Aysha hold particularly high ranks in the Hamas, the second question is whether they carried out the kidnapping on their own accord, believing it to be their obligations as members of the Islamist organization, or if they were ordered to do so from the higher ranks.

The riddle can only be solved once the kidnappers have been found and the other Hamas operatives detained in the last week and a half of raids have been interrogated. The search for the kidnappers will continue and so will the overnight raids in Hebron.


Infographic created by Haaretz

Meanwhile, a fierce second front has erupted on the Gaza border. Some 70 rockets have been fired at the Gaza border communities since Operation Brother's Keeper began, the most severe of which struck a factory in the southern city of Sderot and ignited a massive fire.

The rocket attacks have been carried out mostly by splinter militant groups like an offshoot of the Palestinian Resistance Committees, and not by Hamas, exploiting Israel's second volatile front as its security and intelligence forces are focused on the West Bank.

Regardless of who is launching the rockets, Israel holds Hamas responsible for every attack, whether launched by those loyal to the ruling movement or rebel factions who refuse its authority.

The Israel Defense Forces has responded with harsh strikes on the coastal territory, killing more than half a dozen militants on their way to carry out a rocket attack. As the situation around the Gaza Strip continues, the IDF is intensifying its operation, with a focus on targeted assassinations in addition to pinpointed hits on the lower-level militants firing the rockets.

Israel's security cabinet convened late Monday after the bodies were found to determine further course of action, a meeting that was followed immediately by a new round of air strikes on Gaza. Former deputy minister of strategic affairs, Tzachi Hanegbi, has said it is not clear how many of Hamas' leaders will remain alive following the IDF strikes.

The trained eyes of Israel's defense establishment are on alert to threats from both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and to the developments in its neighbors to the north, Iraq and Syria. After a near two-year period of calm, escalation has resumed. Israel has made it clear that it will not tolerate any attacks on its territory or its citizens, and will use its mighty hand to stop them.

Israel's political goal, from the beginning of the operation, was to convince Mahmoud Abbas to annul the Palestinian Authority's partnership with its former rival Hamas. With the recent barrage of rockets from Gaza, Israel is using the opportunity to take the matter into its own hand and strike Hamas in its heartland. The Palestinian factions acting on their own and firing rockets will only encourage a harsher Israeli response.

Hezbollah, Al-Qaida or lone wolf? Brussels shooting bears marks of Islamist world war's new face

When a professional gunman, wearing a baseball cap and carrying a simple sports bag, walked into the Brussels Jewish Museum last Saturday and opened fire on four innocent victims, killing three and leaving the fourth with critical brain injuries, the media in both Israel and Belgium were quick to posit that this was the work of a well-oiled Islamist machine targeting members of the Israeli intelligence community.

The fact that Emanuel and Mira Riva, who were killed in the shootout, were both employees of Israeli government factions under the auspices of the Prime Minister's Office, led to early and uncorroborated assumptions that the two – or at least the wife - were Mossad operatives and deliberate targets of the shooter, tied to either Hezbollah or Al-Qaida.

While the calculated manner of the shooting, as well as the choice of a Jewish institution, indeed point to the hand of a trained Islamist terrorist, it is highly doubtful that the Rivas were specifically targeted as representatives of the Israeli intelligence community.

It is true that Hezbollah has long targeted Israeli and Jewish targets the world over, a threat it intensified in the wake of its senior commander Imad Mughniyeh's assassination in 2009, with a particular focus on Israelis part and parcel to the office of those perpetuators – the Mossad, or better known in covert Israeli speak, the Prime Minister's Office.

But it is also true that neither of the Rivas was a Mossad operative: both were accountants, he a former employee of the Nativ immigration agency that aided Russian Jewish emigres, and she a clerk. Neither were prime targets for the organization, as an Israeli officer would have been.

While the possibility remains that the attack was orchestrated by affiliates of Hezbollah or Al-Qaida, there is little to indicate that it was ordered by the higher ranks of either.

The evidence collected so far, including the lack of organizational support at the scene of the crime and the failure to pinpoint a network of other suspects, indicate that the shooting was carried out by either a local cell of the Islamic Jihad or by a lone gunman.

The Brussels shooter was a professional; that is a fact that cannot be disputed. With little forensic evidence to narrow down the identity of the gunman, investigators are relying on security footage from the museum, which captured him walking calmly into the tourist attraction, pulling out an AK-47 Kalashnikov rifle, shooting at his targets, and in just as measured a walk with which he entered, leaving the premises after completing the deed. He even remembered to zip his bag. Despite earlier reports, the gunman was alone at the scene of the shooting, and no getaway car awaited him, nor is there evidence that he received on-spot logistical support.

A viable suspect has been arrested, a 29-year-old Frenchmen of Algerian descent, named Mehdi Nemmouche. He was caught by authorities at a bus station in Marseille, en route from Amsterdam with a stop in Brussels. In his bag, which French police say was searched as part of a routine drug inspection, was an AK-47 Kalshnikov rifle, a revolver and ammunition, a GoPro camera said to be worn by the Brussels shooter and the baseball cap and clothing seen in CCTV on the body of the gunman during the attack.

A French police source called Nemmouche, who is still in custody and maintained the right to silence in the first 24 hours of his arrest, "an expert gunman and a crap fugitive." Shortly after Nemmouche's arrest, authorities released a video in which a voice, apparently belonging to the Frenchman, describes the shooting as an "attack against the Jews."

Nemmouche was not stopped by chance. He was already circulating in the French database as a national who had traveled to Syria to train and fight with jihadis there. His inspiration for Islamist warfare was apparently gleaned during his near year-long stay in a French prison, where he was incarcerated for robbing a convenience store.

The Brussels shooting bears remarkable similarities to the attack in Toulouse in 2012, when gunman Mohamed Mera, affiliated with Jihad but acting alone, shot and killed four people outside a Jewish school.

Like Mera, the Brussels gunman wore a personal miniature camera on his chest. And like Mera, his was clearly the work of an Islamist targeting Jews, though not specifically Israelis, and not necessarily ordered by the higher ranks of a global Jihad movement.

Just hours after the attack in Brussels, two Jewish men were assaulted leaving a synagogue in Paris and left in serious condition, harping back to the grotesque murder of Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old French Jew tortured, burned and dismembered by a "lone" group in 2007.

If the Brussels attack was indeed carried out without instruction by the greatest terrorist groups of our time, the act of a "lone" wolf must not be dismissed as less threatening than if it were. The other two anti-Jewish attacks this week - both at the Kansas Jewish center and in Paris – were also carried out by "lone wolves".

A world war is on the rise, by an army of rogue soldiers whose motives are the same but do not answer to a specific commander. Thousands of Westerners have joined this war, both within the ranks of the jihadi groups in the Middle East and on their own accord in Europe and the United States.

Nowhere is safe, not on the green lawns of Kansas, nor on the cobblestone streets of Brussels, and certainly not in the war-torn cities of Syria. These lone wolves are not alone.