Pundicity/Commentary Magazine..
January '20..
Link: http://schanzer.pundicity.com/23598/the-new-rocket-threat-to-israel
Israel’s southern population came under attack once again in November 2019. The Iran-backed terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fired more than 450 rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Israelis sprinted to shelters, and the Iron Dome air-defense system once again shielded them from the onslaught. Thousands of miles from the action, sitting in the back seat of an Uber, I was on the phone with an Israeli official on the Gaza border who explained to me, without hesitation, that Israel had picked this fight.
There would be no attempt to spin this, the official said, even as rockets hurtled across the sky above him. Israel fired first, he said, by liquidating Baha Abu al-Ata, the PIJ military commander in the Gaza Strip. Israel tracked him for months, but he always surrounded himself with human shields. So the Israelis stalked him—and when, at last, he failed to shield himself with living human bodies, they struck with deadly precision. The Israeli Air Force did not just isolate its strike to the building, or the floor of the building, or the room on that floor. It struck al-Ata in his bed, reportedly with only his wife at his side. No one else in the building was hurt.
PIJ, in consultation with the group’s paymasters in Tehran, responded with predictable ferocity. Yet as rocket fire increased, and even when occasional volleys pierced the Iron Dome’s defenses (one struck a highway near the town of Ashdod, narrowly missing traffic), Israel’s decision makers demonstrated remarkable restraint. As the official on the phone explained to me, the Israeli Air Force was calmly and selectively taking out PIJ military leaders and operatives when they had a clear shot. The majority of the bombing runs, however, were aimed at PIJ rocket stores. “We’re hunting rockets,” the official said flatly.
That kind of cool-headed discipline would not be possible without the Iron Dome system. When rockets are prevented from hitting their intended targets, Israeli officials don’t hear calls from the public to send in ground troops. And for most defense officials (at least in this current government), there is no desire to escalate in Gaza. Even as it takes out occasional targets of opportunity, Israel prefers to keep its powder dry. The real danger lies to the north, where a brutal conflict is brewing.
Over the past five years, the Israelis have been fighting a quiet war nearly every night. During what is now known as the “Campaign Between Wars” or “War Between Wars,” the Israelis have taken out high-value targets—more than 200 of them, according to estimates published last year, and it’s probably closer to 300 now—from Syria and Iraq to Lebanon and beyond. As early as 2013, the Israelis spoke euphemistically about such strikes, noting that they were targeting “game-changing weapons” that Iran was transferring to its proxies amid the chaos of Syria’s civil war.
Recently, the Israelis have become much more specific. Their targets are precision-guided munitions, or PGMs.
Until now, Israel has been blessed with ill-equipped enemies. The efforts of Iranian proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and PIJ have been mitigated by Iron Dome, which has an 86 percent success rate (some Israeli officials say it's even higher) in neutralizing incoming enemy projectiles. That rate is boosted by the fact that Israel's foes have been firing unguided, or "dumb," rockets. Without GPS or target-acquisition capabilities, many of these rockets undershoot or overshoot their intended targets. When Iron Dome assesses a rocket's errant trajectory, it declines to intercept it and allows it to explode in an uninhabited space.
