The Israel-Hamas conflict that ended with a
ceasefire on Friday showed the Palestinian group’s ability to build an arsenal
of home-made rockets largely with civilian materials and Iranian expertise,
analysts and officials said, a feat it can likely replicate.
اضافة اعلان
The low cost of such arms and the need to
rebuild Gaza leaves Israel and the international community with a quandary of
how to meet Gazans’ basic needs yet keep ordinary items such as pipes, sugar
and concrete from being put to military uses.
Current and former officials see no easy
answers, saying it is all but impossible to seal off even a relatively small
area such as Gaza and to prevent goods for reconstruction from being turned
into locally-made rockets.
Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad have boosted
the quantity and quality of their rockets since the last Gaza conflict with
Israel in 2014.
“We were extremely surprised by Hamas’
capacities this time around. They had long-distance rockets they didn’t have before.
That is all down to Iran,” said a senior European official on condition of
anonymity.
Israel said Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other
groups fired around 4,360 rockets from Gaza during the conflict, of which
around 680 fell short into the Gaza Strip. Israel’s Iron Dome interceptors,
activated against rockets that threatened its population centers, had a
successful shoot-down rate of around 90 percent, the military said.
It said 60 or 70 rockets still struck population
centers, implying an accuracy rate of around 15 percent. Others fell in open
areas, nonetheless triggering panic and sending Israelis scrambling for
shelters as they flew overhead.
The majority of the rockets, analysts said, were
short-range, unsophisticated and homemade.
“They’re extremely simple to fabricate and they
use metal tubing, metal pipes. They often, believe it or not, will use detritus
from Israeli missiles,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former US State Department
coordinator for counterterrorism.
“It’s just virtually impossible to make a place
completely airtight,” said Benjamin, now president of the American Academy in
Berlin.
The latest Israel-Hamas hostilities were
triggered on May 10 in part by Israeli police raids on Al-Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram
Al-Sharif, one of Islam’s holiest sites, and clashes with Palestinians during
the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Rocket factories
A Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri, said the group
had developed its own expertise producing rockets and needed no help.
“Therefore, any attempt to tighten the blockade
on Gaza to limit the abilities of the resistance will be worthless,” he told
Reuters by phone from Mauritania, where he is visiting.
Palestinian groups have used rockets for years.
Before Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, its Gaza settlements
were frequent targets for short-range mortar and rocket fire from nearby
Palestinian towns.
Rockets only became the go-to weapon for Hamas
after the military barrier that Israel began building around and through the
occupied West Bank in 2003 made it harder for suicide bombers and gunmen to
cross into Israel and carry out attacks.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad smuggled in
factory-grade missiles via the Egyptian Sinai until the 2013 ouster of Islamist
Mohammed Mursi, Egypt’s first democratically-elected president. After he was
replaced by Egypt’s current president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, Cairo largely
choked off that route by destroying tunnels into Gaza.
Egypt’s crackdown triggered what one Israeli
official called a strategic shift by Hamas to develop local rocket fabrication
capabilities with Iranian assistance, provided both by Iranians visiting Gaza
and Gazans traveling abroad.
Now, Israeli and Palestinian sources say, the
guerrillas use Iranian funding and instruction to make rockets inside Gaza that
have ranges of 200km or more, some with warheads carrying hundreds of kilograms
of TNT and shrapnel.
One Iranian security official said Hamas now had
at least three underground factories to produce rockets in Gaza.
In the conflict’s final days, Islamic Jihad
leader Ziad Al-Nakhala boasted about his group’s ability to improvise weapons
from everyday materials.
“The silent world should know that our weapons,
by which we face the most advanced arsenal produced by American industry, are
water pipes that engineers of the resistance turned into the rockets that you
see,” he said on Wednesday.
‘Suitcases of money’
Money, in many ways, is not the issue.
Qatar, with Israeli acquiescence, has provided
substantial funding to Hamas in recent years, by some tallies, millions of
dollars a month, chiefly to pay administrative salaries, some of which can then
be siphoned off.
“It’s not rocket science, so to speak. A guy
from Qatar comes every month with his suitcases of money accompanied by Israeli
soldiers to pay Hamas administrative staff. That then disappears,” said the
senior European official.
An Iranian diplomat in the region said millions
of dollars were handed over to Hamas representatives almost every month, either
carried into Gaza or neighboring countries.
“It does not mean money always came from inside
Iran. We have businesses [in the region] that funded Hamas and it’s not a
secret,” the diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
A western official who follows Hamas activities
closely said the group was able to tap investment portfolios worth hundreds of
millions of dollars in companies across the Middle East.
“It controls about 40 companies in Turkey, UAE,
Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Algeria which deal mainly in real estate and
infrastructure,” the official said.
A second official said the group was also able
to obtain resources from charities sympathetic to its cause across Europe.
US President
Joe Biden said on Thursday that aid
would be sent quickly to Gaza, but coordinated with the Palestinian Authority —
Hamas’ Western-backed rival in the occupied West Bank — “in a manner that does
not permit Hamas to simply restock its military arsenal.”
That is easier said than done.
It would likely require on-the-ground
monitoring, and it is not obvious whether Hamas would permit that or who might
do it.
Dennis Ross, Washington’s former lead diplomat
on Israeli-Palestinian peace, said someone, possibly the Egyptians and others,
would need to have a physical presence in
Gaza to inspect imported goods and
monitor their use.
“If Hamas says ‘no’ then you put the spotlight
on them,” he said, adding one could pressure them by saying, “We’d like to be
providing material to Gaza, but Hamas won’t permit it.”
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