Two Israelis injured – first casualties of day’s 2nd Palestinian rocket barrage

Direct rocket hits to their homes seriously injured a woman of 80 in Kiryat Gat and a man in Ashkelon, when the Palestinians, more than an hour after shooting more than 100 rockets into Israel on Saturday, May 4, widened their scope to the Lachish region (59km NE of Gaza) – targeting the towns of Kiryat Malachi and Kiryat Gat – and still further northeast to Bet Shemesh (77km away) in the Jerusalem hills. Several more people were wounded by flying shrapnel and shock. By mid-afternoon, the Palestinians had fired at least 160 rockets into Israel and there was no sign of their offensive abating. Direct hits against incoming rockets by Dome batteries prevented mass casualties and major damage.

While the Palestinian rocket blitz kept hundreds of thousands of Israelis confined to shelters, they were informed that Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi was closeted with top commanders and security officials for consultations on Israel’s next steps, at the end of which they will be joined by Prime Minister and Defense Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Judging from past performance, the government and high IDF command are hoping that diplomatic contacts with Egypt will put a stop to the Palestinian rocket assault on the Israeli population, without the IDF’s recourse to a large-scale military operation against Gaza. Those contacts have been ongoing for more than a year, since Hamas launched its violent March of Return rampages on the Gaza-Israeli border, with no practical outcome – aside from fruitless Cairo mediation effort for a long-term truce which never materializes.

In the interim, the Palestinian terrorists have honed their skills and upgraded their forces to regular militias and gained overweening confidence. Saturday afternoon, Hamas boasted that its next attacks would target the Ben Gurion international airport, the Dimona nuclear city, Ashdod port and the Haifa oil refineries. While Jihad set its sights on the Eurovision contest taking place in Tel Aviv on April 13.

Only last week, IDF officials tried presenting the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip as making an effort to reach a truce with Israel, except that the pro-Iranian radical Islamic Jihad kept on putting spokes in the wheel by launching long-range rockets against Israeli civilians. This false picture was exposed on April 29, when Hamas fired a long-range rocket into the sea off Israel’s largest port at Ashdod. And the heavy rocket barrage on Saturday finally shot down that pretext when it turned out that the scores of missiles aimed across a wide spectrum of civilian targets were being launched and orchestrated on orders of a joint war-room which Hamas and Jihad had established in the Gaza Strip. How come that the IDF and its intelligence arms were caught napping on Saturday?

It is also worth noting that the IDF has not made any serious effort to put a stop to the heavy rocket barrage at source even after southern Israel was pummeled for six hours or more. Meanwhile, Gaza’s closest neighbors and the towns of Rehovot, Sderot, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Netivot and Ofakim went on high preparedness after the first wave of 100 rockets, most of which were shot down by Iron Dome batteries. The Home Command later ordered local councils to open public shelters, public events, including two soccer games, canceled, farmers were told stay away from their fields and all residents to stay close to sheltered areas.