Israel’s operation in Gaza: limited goals – for now, I

police graduation ceremony, which killed close to 300 members of the group. In all, there were about 1,400 Palestinian dead in Cast Iron, of which about 800 were Hamas militants. The rest were civilians, including women and children.

This time, the Israeli attacks were more surgical in nature, concentrating on killing leaders of Hamas’s military wing and on destroying missile storage sites and other military facilities.

In a signal to Hamas political leadership – letting them know that if Hamas were to escalate its retaliation against Israel, they will be targeted next – the Israeli military dropped precision-guided munitions to explode in the back yard of the home of Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook, one of top civilian Hamas leaders. The explosive yield of the warhead was small enough not to bring the house down, but powerful enough to shatter the building’s windows to send the required message.

Three quick notes:

Hamas’s strategic arm
The destruction of most of the Iranian Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 missiles in the hands of Hamas is a reminder that the missile capabilities of Hamas have been targets of Israel for a while. Three weeks ago, on 24 October 2012, four Israeli military planes attacked and destroyed a sprawling arms factory in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. The attack ignited a huge fire in the destroyed facility and neighboring buildings.

Sudan has been serving as major corridor for arms supplies from Iran to Hamas. About a year ago, Iran began to produce and store short-and mid-range missiles in Sudan. The purpose was to create a back-up missile production and storage facility for Iran in the event similar facilities in Iran were destroyed in an Israeli or American attack. The second purpose was to build and deliver missiles to Hamas from a location which was closer to the Gaza Strip than Iran.

The Israeli attack on 24 October destroyed that production and storage facility (see “Israeli planes destroy Sudanese arms factory suspected of producing chemical weapons for Hamas,” HSNW, 24 October 2012).

Iran and Hamas had more ambitious designs for Hamas’s growing missile fleet.  Libya under Qaddafi had developed a large chemical weapons arsenal. In 2004 Qaddafi agreed to dismantle this arsenal in exchange for the removal of economic and diplomatic sanctions on Libya. The Libyans did begin to destroy their chemical weapons, but the uprising against Qaddafi erupted before the process was completed. As a result, rebel forces, who managed to take over some