Following 3 rocket launches from Gaza on Tuesday evening, the Israel Air Force struck back at targets within Gaza.

This was the first time that Israel has responded with an air assault to the Gaza rocket launches since the Pillars of Defense cease fire. No one was reported injured in the IAF strike.

The Gazan rockets hit in the Eshkol region.

There was also a mortar launched earlier in the day that fell short and landed within the Gaza Strip.

The IDF Spokesperson said,

“The IDF will not accept any attempt to attack Israeli citizens or IDF soldiers, and the IDF has no intention of allowing the return to the situation as it was before Operation Pillars of Defense.
The IDF views the attacks on Israel as very serious, and holds Hamas responsible.”

Earlier in the day police also found the remains of the Palestinian rocket that targeted Israel during President Obama’s visit on March 21.

The Gaza rocket had hit a kindergarten in Sderot. The school was closed and empty at the time for the extended Passover vacation.

Israel’s security apparatus at this point is calling the single missile drop that damaged a road outside Ashkelon “a local event,” but makes clear that the IDF will respond forcefully if more launches happen, the Walla website reports. Which means that the other side gets one freebee. If the reader is in tremendous hurry, we should reveal that the above bit of information is the most crucial, outshining anything else we could possibly report next. Because in societies where maintaining law and order is considered the most elementary part of a government’s duty to its citizens the criminals don’t get a freebee.

You see, on the eve of the “disengagement,” as the transfer buses and the bulk of Israel’s internal security forces were moving in on the Jews of Gaza, then prime minister Ariel Sharon swore an oath, that should a single rocket be fired out of Gaza following the disengagement, “we will react with greater force than ever before.”

Since that promise, Israel has stood twice with its boot on the neck of Hamas and its minions, and twice it let go, each time bragging that walking away from the festering wound that Ariel Sharon had cut open was, somehow, the mature, responsible, even brave thing to do.

Well, here we go again. Eager to show that they’re just as angry as their brethren in the PA over the death in jail of an Arab youngster arrested for stone throwing, Hamas ordered its subordinate gang of thugs, the Islamic Jihad (which is just another name for Hamas, in the end) to shoot a trial missile over the line. A shot across the bow.

Israel is determined to react only to the second one. Which means we should alter Sharon’s famous threat to “should two rockets be fired out of Gaza.” Must keep up with the changing realities.

And IDF sources are saying today that they’re not surprised, that they’d been expecting something like that, it only makes sense, what with all the clashes between a smattering of Arab youths (the PLO is only able to raise a couple dozen rock throwers in each location because its funds have been dwindling—but now, that Israel has renewed the flow of money, they’ll be financing much larger groups).

Here’s a question: If the IDF was well aware that this was coming, how come the sirens didn’t go off in Ashkelon? And how come that glorious expression of the Jewish genius, the Iron Dome, didn’t stop the rocket?

American slang uses the metaphor of a male bovine’s droppings to suggest that a particular statement is entirely unrelated to the truth. In the case of the following disclosure from our brave spokespersons in uniform, the heaps of bovine refuse are high enough to bury the entire bovine:

“This is an isolated incident and not a system-wide decision to return to rocket firing against Israel. It’s merely a few rogue activists who decided on their own to express solidarity with what is happening in Judea and Samaria regarding mostly the issue of the prisoners, which is sensitive not only in Judea and Samaria. We must not forget that there are security prisoners released into Gaza in the Gilad Shalit deal, instead of to their Judea and Samaria homes, and they are engaged in terrorism from morning to night.”

Moo…

Now here’s something a bit closer to reality, another statement, same IDF sources, this time with facts:

A senior security official told Walla this morning that “It doesn’t make sense that while Hamas is negotiating with Israel through the Egyptian, it would be trying to bend Israel’s arm. The launch this morning is against its own strategy. And so, the new reality will be examined over time. If there are additional launches, the IDF will respond with force. There is no intention to allow a return to the time of missile trickles.”

Now the picture is clearer: Hamas, which looks to open up the border passages and increase the flow of incoming goods, including cement (to fortify new rocket launchers replacing the ones destroyed last November), orders its subordinate organization, the Islamic Jihad, to shoot one. The message has nothing to do with prisoners. The message is: we’ll keep the rockets quiet as long as you adhere to our demands. We are in complete control of the rocket fire, no one shoots anything unless we say so – now, do you want quiet or a new war on your border?

Yoni Alper, on his Terror Watch facebook page, posted the above photo from the Temple Mount, taken on Thursday morning.

While Jewish children in Jerusalem are building snowmen and having friendly snowball fights, The Arabs, on the holiest site to Judaism, and a site the Arabs claim is holy to them too, are building symbols of hate, M-75 missiles out of snow, to show what they want to do to Israel.

The M-75 is the Gazan long-range missile that targeted Jerusalem and Tel Aviv during the “Pillar of Defense” operation.

During the war initiated by Gaza, the Palestinians launched M-75 rockets  at Israel from heavily populated areas. Gazan rockets were often launched at Israel from sites next to schools, and mosques.

As far as snow art goes, placing it next to the Al Asqa mosque is true to life.

When Israel evacuated the Jewish communities from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, few imagined that the area would become a platform for the thousands of rockets targeting Israelis living in cities as far as Tel Aviv. As the international community continues to pressure Israel into limiting the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria and eventually withdrawing, one can only wonder who in the UN will guarantee that another terrorist entity will not emerge on Israel’s eastern border.

Most likely, Europe has not even considered what would happen if terrorist elements in Judea and Samaria would start firing rockets at civilians living across Israel. But Europe, like Hamas, has plenty to say about the settlements.

On Monday morning, December 3, the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom was formally summoned to the Foreign Office, to personally hear condemnations of Israeli settlement building. France and Sweden also followed suit, summoning their Israeli ambassadors, while Germany appealed to the Israeli government in a news conference asking Israel to “desist” from building more settlements, stating that the new plans “undermined” efforts to revive peace talks.

Hamas welcomed the international response with spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri, stating that the settlement plans “were an insult to the international community, which should bear responsibility for Israeli violations and attacks on Palestinians.”

Some, however, were not impressed by the almost-panicked address by international European diplomats. Director of the UK-based Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy, Jonathan Sacerdoti, pointed out that:

“The Palestinian representative to the UK was not summoned to the Foreign Office when Palestinians unleashed what some in Israel have called a “third intifada” on Israel, with lethal rockets launched in their hundreds into Israeli civilian areas.”

Indeed, it seems that any sort of terrorist activity coming from Gaza or its prime supporter, Iran, very rarely garners any sort of international public outcry, particularly from Europe. Last week, a U.S. official told CNN that “Iran is finding ways to re-supply Hamas” with long range rockets and other weapons despite the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told CNN on Monday, November 26, that Iran is subjected to a UN resolution prohibiting it from exporting arms, and neighbors of Iran are obligated to enforce this measure.

“We are hopeful that the nations in the region take appropriate steps to halt any attempts to transport weapons to Gaza through their territory or airspace,” said Nuland to CNN.

No echoes of distress were heard from any European leaders on the Iran-Hamas weapons deal.

Furthermore, according to Israel Defense Force spokeswoman Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, Iran “tried during the operation itself to push more and more rockets into the Gaza Strip. Iran is deeply involved with Hamas inside Gaza.”

Even more worrying is the education of future terrorists training to attack Israel from the Gaza Strip. Hamas enlists, educates, and trains as many terrorists as possible to fire rockets into Israel and fight the IDF, along with other Gaza terror groups; the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) and Islamic Jihad. Only this past summer, the first class of a new military training academy in Gaza called Shahid Imad Hamad Academy of Military Training, established by the third largest Gaza terrorist organization, PRC, graduated, having received specialization training in fighting Armored Corps, according to an August Ynet article.

The academy trains students for combat and antitank missile weaponry as well as defense and military studies. According to senior PRC member Abu Suhaib, the school instills religious values, so that students “can confront the Zionist enemy with complete faith in the triumph of God.”

It is these sorts of developments that the international community continues to ignore, indulging instead in constant criticism of the Jewish state. If rocket terrorism against Israeli civilians would be addressed with the same urgency as Israeli settlement building, then perhaps there would be some kind of progress towards a viable, realistic peace. Blind finger-pointing at Israel by France, Britain and others, does not promote peace.

(Anav Silverman lived for two years in the city of Sderot, Israel where she experienced constant rocket attacks on the city while working as international media liaison and frontline reporter between 2007-2009.)

My last post about the recent mini-war with Hamas and friends in Gaza argued that the outcome was not positive for Israel.

Since then, several respected commentators (here and especially here) have argued that the results of the war for Israel were actually quite good, given what’s possible in the Middle East. The joyous celebrations in Gaza, they say, were of a piece with the 1967 Egyptian broadcasts reporting that their tanks were entering Tel Aviv.

Well, yes and no.

It’s true that Israel destroyed a huge amount of missiles, ammunition, smuggling tunnels, workshops and other assets of Hamas. Some important Hamas leaders were killed. The Iron Dome system was remarkably effective, keeping Israeli homefront casualties to a minimum. It will take Hamas several years to rebuild and rearm for the next round.

It’s also true that the options for a complete victory — or rather, what would follow such a victory — were limited. If Hamas were wiped out, who would administer it? Israelis do not want to see their sons and daughters doing occupation duty in Gaza.

But from a psychological point of view, the imposed cease-fire — and it was imposed, by Barack Obama and his ally Mohammed Morsi — is not a victory.

Consider: the cease-fire negotiations — indirect as they may be — treat the fundamentally racist and terrorist Hamas as a legitimate regime, rather than a gang of murderous outlaws. There is already talk of some concessions that Israel will make to Hamas in return for quiet! Hamas exemplifies the atavistic attitudes and behavior that have been rejected by enlightened society for hundreds of years (this should be particularly clear to the highly ‘cultured’ Europeans, but of course it isn’t). Hamas, not Israel, should take responsibility for the violence.

And this: the number of civilian casualties that Israel is permitted to inflict in the process of defending itself is close to zero. This is supposedly based on ‘humanitarian’ considerations, but of course these only apply to Israel, not to the US in Iraq or Afghanistan, not to NATO in its various campaigns, and of course not to places like Syria where rivers of Arab blood can flow before anyone will intervene. The message is that they can try to kill us, but we have to try not to kill them.

This is reinforced by the way Iron Dome and other defensive weapons are presented as ‘solutions’ to the threats of terrorist entities like Hamas and Hizballah. The Iron Dome systems are a wonderful technical achievement which doubtless saved hundreds of lives, and Israel should build more of them — a small country surrounded by enemies must be able to protect its population.

But there is an unfortunate side to its success. During the years of rocket bombardment that led up to the war, international institutions and leaders were for the most part silent, because it has become expected and unexceptional that racist terrorists to do their best to murder innocent people. If Israel’s response is primarily defensive, then this becomes normal.

Attempted murder is not normal, it is criminal and criminals ought to be punished. Hamas officials responsible for the ongoing rocket attacks should be arrested and tried for war crimes. If found guilty, they should be hanged like Eichmann.

Apparently this is the way most nations see it, if they are the ones under attack:

Back in mid-June, during the great Paris weapons show, the Rafael pavilion was absolutely the busiest around, and everybody wanted to look at the new, exciting, Iron Dome system, the greatest achievement in rocket defense ever. But by the end of the show, Rafael hadn’t made a single sale. The Arrow sold well, other systems did great – Iron Dome wasn’t moving. So they contacted their big clients, the serious ones, and asked what gives. And those clients told them no one except Israel has any use for these things. Because in any normal, sane country, if some hooligans were to start targeting civilians with rockets – the army would go and kill them. — Yori Yanover, The Morally Reprehensible Iron Dome

Finally, as always the great powers will intervene if it looks like Israel is about to win a victory that makes a real change on the ground (much US and European policy since 1967 has been a somewhat belated intervention to reverse the results of that war).

It is enormously frustrating and corrosive to morale to have to fight over and over again without hope of settling anything. It reminds me of a children’s book in which an athletic character brags about having been “in the finals five years running.” Another replies “well, they couldn’t have been that final if you had to keep on doing them.” None of Israel’s wars can be final, and they have to keep on doing them.

Perhaps these are some of the reasons Hamas is celebrating while Israelis are glum.

Visit Fresno Zionism.

One week after the conclusion of operation Pillar of Defense in Gaza, the security reality alongside the Gaza Strip border is being reshaped, the IDF has been instructed to show restraint, farmers on both sides are permitted to stretch their tilled lands all the way to the border fence, and should a Hamas or Islamic Jihad cell aim a rocket launcher at Israel, Israeli soldiers would not be allowed to shoot at it before going through channels, Maariv reports this morning.

The rules of engagement have been altered radically. In the recent past, IDF soldiers were instructed to shoot at once at any Gaza resident who approached the fence. Now there is no such thing as firing at will, even if the person approaching engages in sabotaging the security fence. The IDF must treat them now as suspects to be arrested, as is the protocol in Judea and Samaria, and shooting at those suspect is limited to the legs and not beyond.

The rules of engagement have also been changed regarding terrorist cells in the process of launching a rocket. In the past, the IAF would be alerted and a plane would be sent directly to attack the target. Now the attack may tale place only should the terrorist cell actually initiate the process of launching.

Last Wednesday, according to Maariv, two hours after the ceasefire had gone into effect, IDF commanders in the field identified a cell which was setting up a rocket launcher and requested the approval of GOC Southern Command Maj. Gen. Tal Russo to shot at it, but Russo would not give his approval.

Sources in the IDF told Maariv they were surprised at the immediate and complete quiet that took place soon after the ceasefire.

General Russo, who is competing these days for the job of IDF deputy chief of staff, said yesterday: “It will take some reasonable period of time until we know whether we have achieved our objectives. For the time being, the change on the ground has been extreme. We reached a type of normalcy with the campaign, and we have complete quiet.”

For future reference, we should remind ourselves of the Hamas’s magical ability to put a lid on all the rest of the terrorist organizations when it served its objectives.

We should probably also ask General Russo if he heard the one about the guy who jumps off the Empire State Building and at the 20th floor he says: So far everything is fine.

On Monday evening at 7:20 PM a rocket was launched from Gaza. The rocket fell within Gaza.