Preparing for the next Iran-Israel war

Mahmoud Ridha Abbas or Abu Mazen, the aging and long-serving president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), will not be able to pay his civil servants' full salaries this month either. Donor fatigue means that their money is flowing less and less to Ramallah, the West Bank headquarters of Al-Fatah and part of the Palestinian administration. This authority is increasingly challenged by that of Hamas, the organisation that imposes its rule in the Gaza Strip, which is accelerating its smear campaign against the PA, and whose agents inside Israel are also stepping up their campaign to pressure the Israeli Arab population to carry out attacks and bombings in towns and cities inhabited mainly by non-Jewish communities. 

Hamas - it is no secret - is one of the organisations directed by Iran to harass Israel and try to wipe it off the map, as it is still fully in line with Ayatollah Ruhollah Ruhollah Khomeini's injunction to use all possible means to do so. In addition to maintaining discipline and tight control over the two million Gazans who live under its thumb, Hamas's main task is to spread terror by launching missiles on the populations closest to Gaza. 

The persistence of such actions, most often carried out from silos or launching ramps located in basements or near public buildings such as schools, kindergartens or hospitals, has led both the Israeli government and the commanders of its armed forces (IDF) to carry out retaliatory bombardments with surgical precision and to equip themselves with the protective shield known as the Iron Dome. Regarding the former, commanders of the IDF Southern Command in Beersheva, speaking to me on condition of anonymity, confess to having aborted bombing operations when they detected the presence of children in the vicinity of targets. In their view, these human shields do not cause Hamas leaders and their Iranian inspirers and financiers the slightest problem of conscience. They imply that Israel does respect the rules of engagement and the rules of war, although there is obviously always the underlying problem of public opinion that Israel would face if it knowingly caused casualties among the Palestinian civilian population, especially children.  

With regard to Iron Dome, in short, the system works in such a way as to combine total synchronisation between detection radars and the launch of intercepting missiles that will destroy enemy rockets in mid-air, before they reach their target, of course. Iron Dome is more than proving its effectiveness, but it has a major weakness: each rocket Israel launches to destroy an enemy missile costs $50,000, and it takes two to do so. It doesn't matter that the missiles Hamas launches are worth a mere hundred dollars, Israel will have to spend $100,000 to prevent a single rocket from reaching its destination. It is therefore easy to estimate the budgetary effort that Israel would have to expend to deal with offensives in which Hamas would use a barrage of dozens of rockets. And, more to the point, what it would mean if an offensive launched from Gaza were simultaneous with others launched from southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah's power is growing, and from neighbouring Syria. 

Who is pulling the strings of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah? For Kobi Michael, senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), there is no doubt that it is Iran. Speaking to several European media outlets, including Atalayar in Tel-Aviv, Michael believes that "Tehran is forcing Israel to devote huge financial resources and much of its attention to countering the continuous terrorist attacks, which are regularly launched from the border areas". Nor does it rule out the possibility that Hezbollah might do so from the very area that UNIFIL, of which Spanish military personnel form part, is charged with monitoring. 

Much of the IDF's effort and investment has gone into locating and destroying what it calls the "terror tunnels", the underground conduits built under the borders with Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, and used to infiltrate commandos on a mission to assassinate or abduct preferably young Jewish soldiers. Up to seven such tunnels between Gaza and Israel have been discovered and deactivated. Hamas has spent up to ten years patiently constructing these tunnels, which are equipped with electricity and even rails to facilitate the transport of materials. Israel, in turn, has built a massive wall enclosing the entire Gaza border underground, equipped with state-of-the-art electronic equipment capable of detecting any person or device in its vicinity.   

This continued harassment could lead to a head-on clash as soon as Iran sees fit, a judgement that Michael and many other Israeli analysts agree with, pointing to the forced change in Jewish diplomacy symbolised by the Abraham Accords, the new paradigm of relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, which is open to other Muslim countries. 

But if Iran is truly pulling the strings of these terrorist organisations, Israel is also aware that it must resolve the so-called "Palestinian question" if it wants to move forward and rid itself of a problem that continues to hinder its formidable development. This is, for example, the major condition that Saudi Arabia has slipped in order to openly join the Abraham Accords.