Ninety minutes into the 72-hour unconditional ceasefire announced this morning, Hamas launched a suicide attack in which two IDF soldiers were killed and another was kidnapped. Word on the ground in Israel is that Palestinian Islamic Jihad, rather than Hamas, may be responsible for the operation. If those rumors prove accurate, some analysts speculate, it would mean that Iran, PIJ’s longtime patron, is behind the operation and is responsible for scuttling the ceasefire.
The reality is that regardless of PIJ’s involvement, it is virtually certain that Iran played a large role in this morning’s operation. Mounting evidence points to the fact that Hamas’s nearly month-long campaign, now bracketed by the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli civilians and the killing and the kidnapping of IDF soldiers, was an Iranian project from the beginning.
