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Katyusha launchers in Lebanon that attacked Israel's north -- now Hamas can fire them from the South, getting ever closer to Tel Aviv
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| By Israel Insider staff January 3, 2008 |
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A 122 mm Katyusha rocket landed on a building site in northern Ashkelon Thursday, Jan. 3, causing no casualties, but representing a major escalation of weaponry in the south. Similar Katyushas were used by Hizballah to pound northern Israel in 2006. It was the first rocket to hit the northern end of the Mediterranean port and resort town, up to 18km (12 miles) from Gaza.
Until now, the shorter-range Qassam rockets could only reach the town's southern fringe. The rocket attack dramatically illustrated the consequences of Israel's inability, following its retreat from Gaza and the Egyptian border area known as the Philadelphi route, to stop smuggling from Egypt.
The attack came just 24 hours after Israel swallowed without official or public protest Cairo's surrender to the Hamas demand to open the Rafah terminal for unmonitored entry of senior Hamas officials and fighters trained in Iran and Syria, smuggling in weapons and tens of millions of dollars in funding for the Islamic terror organization. Despites the grumbling from Defense Department officials in Jerusalem, the government didn't make a peep, fearing that the deteriorating relations with Israel would overshadow President Bush's trip to the region next week.
As for the security of the more than 100,000 residents of Ashkelon -- not to mention another 150,000 potential victims within the now-expanded radius of the larger and more dangerous rockets, as well as a number of strategic military and industrial targets now within range -- well, the government of Israel didn't say much about that, either.
A senior official in the Prime Minister's Office called the rocket attack on Ashkelon "very problematic" and "a strategic threat," and saying it showed once again the urgency of stopping the arms smuggling from Sinai into the Gaza Strip. There was such urgency that the government of Israel raised nary an official protest to Cairo over the flagrant violation of an agreement reach just a week earlier with Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
"We are concerned that the types of weapons coming into Gaza are giving them new strategic potential," the senior official said. "This was not the first rocket of this type to be fired on Israel, but we are concerned that unless decisive action is taken there could be more of this." The Olmert government has ruled out decisive action, however, such as an invasion of Gaza.
"If we see ongoing smuggling into Gaza of munitions and weaponry, then this a strategic threat for a quarter of a million people in the South who are within the range of the rockets," he said. The official said the government could not sit "idly by," and warned - without mentioning anything about plans for stepped up military action as a result of the rocket attack - that the "continued flow of weaponry and armaments into Gaza from Sinai is an escalatory phenomenon and could lead to a further destabilization in the south." While saying that there was no sense of "crisis" as a result of the rocket attack, the official said it was clear that the current level of weapons smuggling can not go on, and that "actions have to be taken." He did not elaborate.
The official is believed to have added: "Blah blah blah,"suggesting "blah blah, blah blah and emphatically blah."
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