Arms With a Long Reach Help Hamas - NYTimes.com
www.nytimes.com/2012/.../arms-with-long-reach-bolster-hamas.html
4 hours ago – TEL AVIV — When Israel assassinated the top Hamas military commander in Gaza on Wednesday, setting off the current round of fierce fighting ...Arms With a Long Reach Help Hamas
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
A child watches from a field
near Ashdod, Israel, as a missile is fired to intercept an incoming
Palestinian rocket. About 30 rockets were fired from Gaza into southern
Israel on Saturday morning.
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: November 17, 2012 49 Comments
TEL AVIV — When Israel assassinated the top Hamas military commander in Gaza on Wednesday, setting off the current round of fierce fighting, it was aiming not just at a Palestinian
leader but at a supply line of rockets from Iran that have for the
first time given Hamas the ability to strike as far as Tel Aviv and
Jerusalem.
Multimedia
The Missiles and Their RangesRelated
-
Israel Broadens Its Bombing in Gaza to Include Government Sites (November 18, 2012)
-
As Battlefield Changes, Israel Takes Tougher Approach (November 17, 2012)
-
U.S. Fears a Ground War in Gaza Could Hurt Israel and Help Hamas (November 17, 2012)
Readers’ Comments
Share your thoughts.
The commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, had shifted Hamas’s low-grade militia
into a disciplined force with sophisticated weapons like Fajr-5 rockets,
which are named after the Persian word for dawn and have significantly
increased the danger to Israel’s major cities. They have a range of
about 45 miles and are fired by trained crews from underground launching
pads.
Hamas had perhaps 100 of them until the Israeli attacks last week, which
appear to have destroyed most of the stockpile. The rockets are
assembled locally after being shipped from Iran to Sudan, trucked across
the desert through Egypt, broken down into parts and moved through
Sinai tunnels into Gaza, according to senior Israeli security officials.
The smuggling route involves salaried employees from Hamas along the
way, Iranian technical experts traveling on forged passports and
government approval in Sudan, Israeli officials said.
Mr. Jabari’s strategy has been so effective and alarming for Israel that
it is preparing for a possible next stage in the four-day-old battle: a
ground war in which its troops would seek to destroy remaining rocket
launching bases and crews and munitions factories.
Under Mr. Jabari, Hamas also developed its own weapons industry in Gaza, building long-range rockets as well as drones that they hoped to fly over Israel just as Israeli drones roam the skies of Gaza, sowing fear in its population.
The current operation to eliminate the Hamas rocket launchers could
serve to cripple the ability of Iran’s allies in Gaza from retaliating
should Israel ever carry out its threat to attack Iranian nuclear
facilities.
“Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad are building weapons with experts from
Iran,” one top security official said Saturday, speaking on condition of
anonymity. “What we took care of last night was their own production
facility for U.A.V.’s,” he added, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles,
or drones. “This was all the work of Jabari, who was a very
sophisticated and strategic thinker.”
A number of recent Israeli military attacks were aimed at cutting the
supply chain into Gaza. In late October, a munitions factory in Sudan
was hit from the air. Israel did not acknowledge carrying out the
attack, but the winks and nods of officials here make clear that it did.
Israel has carried out several other such attacks on Sudan, including on convoys, in the past few years.
In addition, Mossad agents killed a Hamas official in a Dubai hotel in early 2010 because he was thought to be crucial to the Hamas supply chain of weapons and rockets into Gaza.
One official here said that until Israel ended its military occupation
of Gaza in 2005, there were only primitive weapons factories there. The
Hamas rockets had a flight capacity of about a mile, they could not be
aimed and they flew in a wild cylindrical pattern. Hamas then built
better rockets that could fly up to 12 miles.
That changed little until 2007, when Hamas fighters pushed the
Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority out of Gaza into the West Bank and
took over governing the coastal strip.
“At that point, Jabari turned his neighborhood defense operation into a
real army,” said a retired Israeli general whose portfolio included Gaza
and who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He organized what was a
militia into companies, battalions and brigades. He sent commanders to
Syria and to Iran to be trained by the Revolutionary Guards. And then he
built up this whole new branch to develop military technology focusing
on long-range missiles.”
The collapse of the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya last
year created other supply options for Hamas as Libyan military
storehouses were raided and the equipment sold off. Those weapons were
driven across Egypt and into Gaza.
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Jabari’s death will truly cripple
Hamas, or whether it will find someone equally adept to take his place,
the officials said.
Either way, Hamas now has a range of rockets and weapons in its arsenal,
said Jeffrey White, a former analyst with the United States Defense Intelligence Agency and now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
In addition to the Fajr-5, Hamas has a few hundred of what are known as
enhanced Grad rockets, which have a range of about 25 miles. The Grads
are 122-millimeter rockets that have bigger warheads than the standard
Grads, but their accuracy is relatively low. The Grads may also be
coming from Iran, Mr. White said, but others are made in Gaza and
imported from Libya.
In addition, Hamas has hundreds of standard Grads that have a range of
about 12 miles, as well as thousands of homemade mortars and Qassam
rockets with a range of about six miles.
Israeli officials said the movement of the Fajr-5 rockets through Egypt
could not go unnoticed there, given their size. Each is 20 feet long and
weighs more than 2,000 pounds — the warhead alone weighs 375 pounds —
and the trucks carrying them across Egyptian bridges and through
roadblocks into Sinai would be hard to miss.
In the current conflict, Israel’s antirocket system, known as Iron Dome,
has been more effective than expected, but still dozens of rockets have
landed.
Whether the military operation against Gaza is a dress rehearsal for any
future attack on either Iran or Lebanon — where Hezbollah has thousands
of rockets pointed at Israel — is a matter under debate here. Some see
it as clearing away any possible trouble from Gaza. Others say that
makes little sense, given the difference of scale in the conflict in
Gaza and any war against Iran or Hezbollah. Hamas’s arsenal is tiny
compared with what Hezbollah in Lebanon is thought to have: thousands of
rockets capable of hitting Tel Aviv.
Yonatan Touval, an analyst with Prime Source, a private Tel Aviv
risk-assessment company, said, “The Iron Dome system is ineffective in
intercepting longer-range projectiles, such as those that would be
launched from Lebanon toward the Tel Aviv area. To address this threat,
Israel is currently developing the Magic Wand system, but it is not
expected to become operational before 2015.”
He added that the fighting now was therefore not really a test of a
future conflict involving Iran and Lebanon. “If Israel’s political
leadership is treating the current operation in Gaza as something of a
rehearsal for a future war with Hezbollah and Iran, it is rehearsing the
wrong play,” he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment