Israel is pointing fingers at Iran as the culprit behind the most serious escalation on it’s southern front in four years.
Less than a month after Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps fired 32 rockets toward Israel’s northern Golan Heights, the Iranian-funded Islamic Jihad, along with Hamas, fired some 180 Iranian-made, 120-millimeter mortar shells from the Gaza strip. The barrage included the more precise 107-millimeter rocket, which has a range of about ten kilometers into the communities in southern Israel.
It was the largest salvo fired from the Gaza Strip since the end of Operation Protective Edge in 2014. In response, Israel carried out the most extensive retaliation since 2014, striking 65 Hamas targets across the entire Gaza Strip, including a dual-purpose tunnel dug one kilometer into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and then 900 meters into Israeli territory.
According to IDF Spokesperson Brig.-Gen. Ronen Manelis, the tunnel was meant to not only carry out attacks against Israel, but to smuggle weaponry into the blockaded coastal enclave.
Despite Israel’s intelligence superiority over terror groups, as well a blockade imposed both by the IDF and Egypt, Hamas and other terror groups in the Strip have restocked their supply of weapons in the four years since the last round of fighting between Israel and Hamas.
The mass-produced Iranian mortar shells used in yesterday’s salvos were also used by Islamic Jihad in an attack in January, as well as a barrage 12 mortar shells toward an army outpost in November.
Israel has intercepted Iranian weapons destined for the Strip several times, including just months before the outbreak of Operation Protective Edge when it stopped the Klos-C commercial ship filled with Syrian long-range rockets.
Before the salvos, less than 10 projectiles had been fired from the Hamas-run Strip into Israeli territory in 2018. The previous year saw 31, mainly during the month of December after US President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and announced his intention to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In 2016, some 15 were launched toward Israel, and in 2015, another 21.
With an estimated 180 projectiles fired into Israel in one 24 hour period, that makes the total amount of projectiles fired into Israel more than the total number of rockets and mortars fired from the Hamas-run Gaza Strip since 2014.
Speaking on a conference call organized by The Israel Project, Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, the former director general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and former head of the research division in IDF Military Intelligence said that that the “relatively short” round of violence on Tuesday was in a way “encouraged by the Iranians.”
Tuesday’s violence was “another reflection of Iran’s frustrations and tensions which is trying to show it can cause trouble and instability,” he said, pointing to Hamas’ involvement with the March of Return and how Yihya Sinwar has boasted about his close ties to Hezbollah and Iran, including IRGC Quds Force commander Maj.-Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
“Iran doesn’t want stability here. They want to make everyone realize that they are a player and that they should be taken very seriously with a lot of respect and in this way deter people from putting more pressure on them, but it isn’t working.”
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