Hamas doubles down on war crimes
ISRAEL WILL WORK HARD TO DESTROY AS MANY LAUNCH SITES AS POSSIBLE. — GURNEY
There is something like a genuine and proper moral equivalency that could be drawn from the proposition that the life of two-year-old Ahmad Mohammed Atallah al-masri, one of six children killed when an Israeli missile landed near Beit Hanoun in Gaza this week, was no less precious than the life of 71-year-old Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, still very much undead and coping with the worst eruption of Israeli-palestinian violence in at least seven years.
You could also say that the life of 16-yearold Nadine Awad, killed along with her father, Halil, when a Hamas rocket landed in the city of Lod on Tuesday night — they were Arabs, incidentally — should be remembered as a blessing, in the same way that the 19-year-old Yeshiva student Yehuda Guetta, murdered by Palestinian gunmen at a checkpoint in the West Bank last week, is remembered.
With fighting between Israel and terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip once more rocking the region, Israelis and the world are again seeing the incredible Iron Dome technology in effect. Unfortunately, innocent Gazans are paying the price for the efforts of Hamas and others to circumvent Israel’s miraculous defensive technology.
The recent outbreak of fighting, triggered in part by recent tension over proposed expansion of Israeli neighbourhoods in Jerusalem, has seen massive volleys of rockets fired at Israeli civilian areas — more than one thousand in the first 48 hours of the fighting, according to the Israeli military. It seems almost quaint to note that indiscriminate attacks on civilians is a war crime. Everyone knows it is, no one seems to care much when the target is Israelis. Since most of the rockets used by Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza are primitive and unguided (even essentially homemade), many of the rockets fired at Israel head towards uninhabited areas and are ignored by the Israelis; those that are tracking towards something of value — a military facility or troop concentration, an industrial target or residential area — are engaged by Iron Dome, a high-tech system that uses powerful radars, advanced computers and agile but relatively small missiles to destroy Gazan rockets before they reach their targets.
Israel claims it negates 90 per cent of what it attempts to shoot down — the rockets or artillery shells that are actually heading toward a target of value. Though impossible to verify, we’ve all seen the astonishing videos of swarms of Gazan rockets exploding in mid-air, wiped out en masse by Iron Dome.
The terror groups firing the rockets have adapted their strategy to account for Iron Dome. The enormous simultaneous volleys of rockets, and the targeting of cities deep inside Israel, are clearly designed to overwhelm Iron Dome, both by forcing the Israelis to spread their units across more of the country and also simply to overcome the system with the sheer volume of incoming fire.
In a briefing to the media on Wednesday, Israeli officials said that Iron Dome is still working with about 90-per-cent effectiveness. That’s obviously good news for Israel, for as long as their ammunition stockpile holds out — Hamas may well have more dumb, homemade rockets than Israel has hyper-sophisticated missiles to shoot them down. Israel will work hard to destroy as many launch sites as possible, preferably with air strikes from jets or drones, and if necessary, a ground invasion (though Israeli officials said on Wednesday that no ground invasion was planned at this point).
And in the meantime, as long as Iron Dome keeps working, everyone will be better off — including the Palestinians in Gaza.
This seems counterintuitive, but recall that Iron Dome is a purely defensive weapon. If it was 100-percent effective, with every potentially dangerous rocket destroyed before it could reach its target, Israel would face little internal pressure to retaliate or escalate. Hamas could fire a billion rockets at Israel, but in the face of a totally effective Iron Dome, they’d simply be demonstrating their own impotence. Alas, Iron Dome, as good as it is, is not 100-per-cent effective, and some rockets get through. Some of those rockets will hurt or kill Israelis, and that makes retaliation almost impossible for Israeli officials to avoid. With Hamas and its rivals hurling hundreds of rockets at Israel a day, avoiding escalation becomes impossible.
There’s a particularly sad irony here — some of the rockets fired from Gaza fail and fall short. Israeli officials said Wednesday that they’ve noticed an abnormal number of rockets failing, perhaps somewhere around 20 per cent. Every weapon has some low rate of failure; Hamas’s arsenal is largely improvised and homemade, making the rate higher. An Israeli air force officer, speaking on background with the National Post, said that the tactics being employed today by Hamas, including firing at longer ranges, seem to be resulting in more misfires and launch failures than the norm. Some of those rockets land in Gaza itself, killing and maiming innocents there, the Israelis said. A Hamas rocket with only a slim chance of ever hurting an Israeli stands a damn good chance of killing a Gazan if it flames out and falls to earth randomly over the densely populated enclave.
Sadly, that too suits Hamas’s agenda just fine. For Hamas, dead Gazans are good for business — a few errant rockets wiping out local families can just be blamed on Israel. As ever, Israel, though imperfect, still tries to avoid needless loss of innocent life, while Hamas seeks it out, and reaps a propaganda victory no matter what side of the border the dead happened to live. It’s a cruel, cynical thing, but there’s nothing new about that. And until Hamas stops firing or Israel invents a truly perfect defence system, it won’t likely ever change.