War or not, violence in Israel shows no signs of abating

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Israeli airstrikes on Gaza continued overnight Saturday as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) targeted Hamas positions in response to ongoing barrages of rockets fired at southern and central Israeli communities. 

In less than a week, years of uneasy detente between Hamas and Israel have unraveled, leaving dozens of people in Gaza and at least 10 in Israel dead, including young children, and many thousands more injured, displaced, and terrified by the prospect of not only another war but rising unrest in so-called mixed Palestinian-Jewish communities in Israel.

For a while on Thursday night, it looked like Israeli forces had outright invaded Gaza. While Hebrew-language media outlets reported that tanks had been sent to the front, English media reported a ground incursion, based on comments from the IDF foreign spokesperson, Jonathan Conricus, who later said he made a mistake and apologized. 

The IDF had earlier called up 7,000 reservists and deployed tanks to the frontier with Gaza in response to waves of rockets fired into Israel from the strip by Hamas militants along with attacks from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group less well-known internationally. Jaysh al-Ummah, with links to al-Qaeda, also boasted it was behind rockets fired at southern Israel on May 10.

Defense Minister Benny Gantz has authorized the activation of another 9,000 reserve soldiers.

The belief that Israeli boots could soon be in Gaza City were enough to get Hamas fighters and leadership where the IDF wanted them, military experts and people familiar with the operation told Kurdistan 24.

“It was a feint. It was not only a statement by the spokesman but we also started moving battalions, moving tanks, making all the moves as if an incursion was starting,” said Elliot Chodoff, an Israeli strategic and political military analyst.

“The purpose was to draw them out, to get them to move into their defensive positions, and the Air Force was waiting with 160 airplanes to welcome them,” Chodoff said during an interview on Friday before Shabbat.

Hamas had spent the last seven years developing an extensive underground tunnel network under Gaza City, he explained, which the IDF calls the Metro.

“The problem that they have is that our intel knew where they were, and the munitions that we have are sufficiently precise that we can actually pinpoint the target and cause it to collapse. One of the advantages that the tunnels had up until now is that, if you didn’t hit it precisely, you would miss.”

Israel’s security agency Shin Bet said it assassinated at least 11 key Hamas commanders in Gaza, among them Bassem Issa, commander of the Gaza City brigade; Hassan Kaogi, head of the group’s military intelligence security department; and Sami Radawn, head of the technical department.

“Taking out key leadership is important. The guy who is behind their rocket program is more important than taking out one of their field commanders,” Chodoff said. “The ones who are much harder to replace are what I call the middle management – the ones who are in direct contact with the troops, who know the terrain, who have learned that area well. It’s much harder to promote people to those promotions in a non-state military organization.”

But Chodoff didn’t rule out a full ground incursion.

“An air operation is insufficient. That doesn’t mean we can’t walk away and declare a victory.”

A ground operation doesn’t require moving massive brigades either, he said. “It can be done surgically, it can be done in a limited fashion … and it also doesn’t necessarily mean physically going into the cities because that would be a nightmare.”

“In part, it depends on how far Israel wants to go to end this,” he said. “As of now it hasn’t gone far enough and it is my personal belief that it can’t go far enough from the air” because Hamas doesn’t rely on large industrial sites to build its weapons.

The barrage of rockets fired from Gaza – over 2,000 since Monday, according to the IDF, has at times appeared to overwhelm the country’s indigenous Iron Dome missile defense system, long touted as the gold standard for short-range rocket interception. The rockets have mostly landed in southern Israel but some reached as far north as Tel Aviv. 

Devastation in Gaza 

It’s not yet clear what a ground invasion would look like, but the 2014 war, called Operation Protective Edge by the IDF, lasted for 50 days and saw thousands of civilians killed and tens of thousands more injured, overwhelmingly in Gaza, but also Israelis who were hit by indiscriminate rocket fire.

With billions of dollars in military aid from the US every year and a formidable indigenous defense industry, Israel’s military power far outstrips anything Hamas is capable of, but it’s Palestinian and Israeli people – civilians – who are ultimately the victims.

Gaza is effectively besieged on all fronts and often called the world’s largest open-air prison. Its residents include second and third-generation refugees, including descendants of people who fled Palestine during the 1967 war. Poverty is rampant, and Israel and Egypt control access in and out of the strip.

The latest airstrikes have destroyed prominent apartment tower blocks, some of which were home to dozens of families. On Saturday an airstrike destroyed a 12-storey building that housed the Associated Press and Al Jazeera media offices, but that building also was home to people. Israel maintains that Hamas uses Gazans as human shields, hiding offices, and even weapons among the civilian population. Airstrikes that destroy these buildings are preceded by a phone call or what the IDF calls a “roof knock” – a bomb dropped on the roof as a warning to residents that they need to flee the building before it is destroyed. If they survive, they’re left homeless and could be forced to travel miles, often amid a barrage of airstrikes or artillery fire to shelter with family and friends.

Two Gaza residents who were scheduled to speak to Kurdistan 24 for this article could not keep their appointments because they had to flee their homes and another said she was too traumatized to talk about her experiences.

Nedal Samir Hamdouna, a freelance journalist in Gaza, told Kurdistan 24 in a brief interview on Sunday afternoon that his family was safe in north Gaza, but “terrified, keeping themselves inside.”

“The children were crying, especially when they are bombing the area,” he said. “They are searching for the corner [of the house] that could be less dangerous from the other rooms.”

One airstrike on a house in Al Shati refugee camp in Gaza overnight Friday killed 10 members of the same family, including eight children. At least 17,000 Gazans have fled their homes in the last six days, according to the United Nations. Although Egypt keeps its side of the border tightly locked most of the time, hospitals in North Sinai are now reportedly preparing for an influx of injured Palestinians after officials agreed to open the Rafah border crossing to the wounded on Saturday.

While people in central and southern Israel mostly have access to bomb shelters (called “safe rooms”), communities there are still living on the edge, not only because of the incessant rocket fire, but also because it’s unclear exactly what capabilities Hamas has amassed since 2014.

Iron Dome

Iron Dome uses target selection algorithms that choose and track targets and then decide how many interceptors to fire and when, but prioritizing a rocket more likely to fall into a populated area.

“If it’s deployed properly it’s created a network of batteries,” Chodoff explained. First, the system identifies the launch site. Because the rockets are unguided, they follow a predetermined ballistic course.

“The technology is very impressive, but the theory is not that complicated,” he said. “When you throw an object, once it leaves your hand its impact point is predetermined.” The batteries, operating together, pick off the rockets that are posing the greatest threat.

“It’s basic physics. With modern radar, picking it up, tracking it for a second gives you more than enough data for the computer to predict where it’s going to hit.”

A typical Iron Dome Battery has up to four rocket launchers with 20 missiles each. Israel currently has roughly a dozen systems deployed, and manufacturer Rafael Advanced Defence Systems says one system can protect a medium-sized city from projectiles fired up to 70 km away, which should protect Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and the international Ben Gurion airport from Hamas’ typical rockets.

Although the IDF says Iron Dome has been 90 percent effective in the last week, the sheer number of rockets fired means, statistically, some will still get through, and even one is potentially deadly. And because Iron Dome missiles don't destroy an approaching rocket entirely, the debris can potentially still injure or kill as it falls to the ground.

Israel’s national emergency medical service, known as Magen David Adom, said Saturday that it had treated around 450 people injured as a result of rocket fire.

Hamas on Thursday said it fired a 250-kg rocket at Israel’s second airport in the southern resort city of Eilat, near the border with Egypt, after flights were diverted there from Ben-Guiron. Hamas' Qassam brigade had recently claimed the group had new longer-range missiles capable of hitting the Ramon airport in Eilat. It also claimed to have launched a “suicide drone” near Gaza on Wednesday, which the IDF said it intercepted and caused no damage. The military said it shot down a second drone Friday that had crossed into Israel.

Iron Dome can apparently intercept the suicide drones – at least two have been stopped. Similar drones have been used by militias operating in Iraq, including one that hit Erbil International Airport in April.

The drones are easy to procure and expendable. “They’re a cheap guided missile, basically,” said Chodoff. But they also suggest at least a transfer of technology from Iran to Hamas. 

Rockets Endanger Israelis

No matter where in Israel they live, most people have one of several mobile phone or smartwatch apps available to tell them when incoming rockets are detected. 

Marc Schulman, a journalist, was out “in the open,” meaning that he was outside a bomb shelter, when the first rocket alarm in Tel Aviv sounded on Monday. It was especially unexpected, he told Kurdistan 24 on Friday, because the prevailing belief was Hamas was in no mood for a conflict and “we hadn’t done anything” to provoke the hundreds of rockets that were fired at Tel Aviv.

“I’m glad I don’t have young kids anymore, because how do you explain this to them?” he said.

Schulman recounted how he ducked into a nearby residential building along with other people caught unawares, who were all ushered into the basement shelter. (Schulman said he stayed in the lobby so he would know what was happening.)

Another salvo came as he headed home after, so he again had to scramble for shelter, this time in a Japanese restaurant whose staff helped everyone take cover in the toilets, away from the large picture window in the front.

Israel’s modern commercial heart, Tel Aviv has only recently fully lifted COVID-19 restrictions and allowed the pubs and restaurants to reopen, he explained, “but the next day the streets were deserted,” Schulman said. “It’s depressing.”

In Tel Aviv, an alert gives about two minutes’ notice before impact. “Two minutes doesn’t sound like a long time,” Schulman said, “but in Ashkelon they might have fifteen seconds.”

Judith Spanglet has been in Israel for 50 years. Now in her 70s, she lives in Ashkelon, roughly 13 km north of the Gaza Strip. “Our apartment has a safe room. I wouldn’t have bought an apartment without one, and we just moved our bedroom to the safe room.”

“During the day we just keep going back and forth. There’s no deliveries of food, so my husband just went out quickly and got what we needed. He told me not to worry.” 

She’s planning to visit some of her children in Jerusalem later Sunday for the Shavuot holiday, but said she’d probably go home on Tuesday.

“Many, many people have offered” to host her across Israel, including in the north, “but you want to be in your own home,” and she didn’t want to “run away” during Shabbat (the Sabbath), starting on Friday night.

“But now I’m happy to do something that I would normally probably do”: visit her children and grandchildren for the holiday.

“We don’t hear everything, but we hear what our forces are doing, the Iron Dome, the sirens. It’s the noise of war and I think a normal person’s nervous system is not built for that and it doesn't matter how much resilience you have and I think I’m pretty resilient and when I was a little younger I would be running around visiting people in their homes that are having a hard time. That was my job.” A trauma therapist, she runs a nonprofit and helped to establish one of six Resilience Centers, which according to the Israel Trauma Coalition, provide “immediate, proactive intervention, training and real time relief.”

“One person’s resilience helps somebody else,” she said. “My kids are very resilient, the ones who live in Sderot.” But this time one of her son’s neighbors’ homes was hit directly by a rocket, just a few meters from her son and his six children.

“The next morning I asked the 3-year-old how she slept, and she said ‘I dreamt I was all alone.’ So we know one of the signs of a traumatic event if we know you feel alone. Even if you’re with a lot of other people you can feel you’re all alone.”

Spanglet asked the family to take a photo together just so the children – and she – could look at it and see “that we’re okay, that we’re all okay.”

Shock can change a person for life, she explained. Magen David Adom says it has treated 192 people for stress symptoms since Monday.

During a 45-minute-long interview with Kurdistan 24 on Sunday morning, Spanglet left her safe room. She spoke calmly. But she sat upright in a chair, “not in a recliner, so my feet are on the ground, and if I need to I will just walk straight into the room that I’m looking at.”

Spanglet stressed that Israel needed to defend itself from Hamas. “We didn’t ask for this.” But she said she hoped it would be over soon – not just the rockets and airstrikes, but the conflict itself.

“The only thing that’s going to help us now is if we’re good to somebody else,” she said. “If there’s traumatic energy there has to be a healing energy.”

Ethnic Unrest 

The outbreak of violence to a degree not seen since 2014 did not start with Hamas. It comes after weeks of protests by Palestinians in East Jerusalem over the pending eviction of six families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in favor of Jewish families – a real estate dispute rooted in fears of demographic change in East Jerusalem.

Also preceding the rocket attacks were clashes over restrictions at the Damascus Gate in the Old City and Palestinian Muslims’ access to worship at Al Aqsa mosque during the holy month of Ramadan. Al Aqsa sits on a site in Jerusalem’s Old City (itself in East Jerusalem) that is one of the holiest in Islam, but is also sacred to Christians and Jews, and tensions over access to the site have occasionally turned violent. Coupled with perennial tensions over the May 10 Jerusalem Day holiday, which marks the Israeli capture of the city in 1967, tensions were high before Hamas got involved.

More striking, and possibly more ultimately dangerous, is escalating violence between communities in Israel. It’s easily described as sectarian, intercommunal, or ethnic, but actually reflects deep-seated issues in so-called mixed communities, experts told Kurdistan 24.

The violence this past week has at times appeared targeted and yet also indiscriminate: videos posted on social media appeared to show mobs looking for Arabs in so-called mixed cities such as Haifa in the north and in Lod, also called al-Lydd, near Tel Aviv. In one particularly horrifying incident in Bat Yam, an Arab man was pulled from his car, beaten, and lynched on live television. (The Israeli government refers to Arab citizens of Israel as Arab Israelis; some of them use the same, or refer to themselves as Palestinian Israelis or simply Palestinians.)

But Jewish Israelis, too, have been the targets of vigilantes. In Acre, a mixed town in the northwest, a Jewish man was hospitalized in critical condition after a mob attacked his car with sticks and stones, while another was stabbed in Lod, while Arab rioters burned a synagogue there on Tuesday. 

Another synagogue was torched in the city on Thursday night, and Arabs were blamed for the shootings of three people. One 19-year-old Israeli soldier in Jaffa was beaten so badly his skull was fractured.

“Arab doctors once praised for their valiant efforts to treat COVID patients are now being targeted with violence and are afraid to work,” said Anwar Mhajne, an Assistant Professor at Stonehill College in Massachusetts who has family in Umm al-Fahem and Jerusalem.

“The extremist mobs are ganging up and attacking random Arab citizens in the streets, mosques, homes, and even universities,” she told Kurdistan 24 on Thursday. “They are vandalizing Palestinian-owned shops. Some are carrying weapons like handguns, rifles, and knives. They are chanting ‘kill all Arabs’ and ‘death to all Arabs.’ The police are using guns on Palestinian protestors and raid houses of Palestinian citizens. The community has no police on its side – no mainstream media. No state. No domestic public support. The international community needs to step in.”

"My mom said this is worse than the Six-Day War," she added.

More than 300 people were arrested in cities across the country, and officials, including Israel’s chief rabbi, have called for an end to the violence. The defense minister, Gantz, redeployed border police usually tasked with controlling movement in and out of the West Bank to cities inside Israel. Gantz said on Tuesday that the IDF would not be involved in policing activities.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is under intense political pressure from an ongoing corruption trial and his failure to form a government after four elections in the last two years, declared a state of emergency in Lod as protesters threw rocks at police after the funeral of Musa Hassuna, an Arab man in his 30s who had been shot dead during a protest on Monday.

“It was the first time the government had used emergency powers over an Arab community since 1966,” noted Mhajne.

“Lod residents have been experiencing state discrimination for a while,” she said, explaining the local authorities had literally separated Jewish and Arab communities with a 3-meter-high wall a decade ago.

“Officials said it was to reduce crime, but Israeli Arabs said it was an attempt at enforcing segregation,” she said.

“The state's backlash against the Palestinian community in Israel and its increased discriminatory attitude toward the community over the past few years have made the community frustrated with the Israeli political system as a vehicle for political action.” 

Editing by John J. Catherine