Hamas launched dozens of rockets from Gaza on Tuesday, demonstrating the group’s continued capabilities to attack Israel.
Hamas announced it targeted the Israeli city of Netivot, which is about 6 miles from the Israeli-Gaza border, though most of the rockets were intercepted by Israel’s missile defense systems or fell into open areas.
The Israel Defense Forces located the compound where the rockets were launched from and found three launchers, each with 10 barrels, a number of which were loaded with rockets, it said in a statement. Israeli forces destroyed the compound and launchers.
The rocket fire comes after the Israel-Hamas war marked its 100th day earlier this week. Despite three months of heavy combat — which has led to more than 24,000 deaths, civilians and combatants, widespread displacement, and the threat of disease and starvation — Hamas is still able to threaten the lives of Israelis who live near the strip.
It also further crystalizes the struggle Israel faces — extreme right-wing politicians who believe Israeli forces should be more aggressive, the widespread domestic support to destroy Hamas, and international calls for a ceasefire and accusations it is carrying out genocide in Gaza.
“The continued firing of rockets tells us that we haven’t finished our mission,” Yaakov Amidror, a retired general who served as national security adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told the New York Times. “There are still areas that we need to clean up.”
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said this week that the military campaign in northern Gaza “has ended” while efforts in the southern part of the enclave “will end soon.” Israel announced on Monday it withdrew one of its army divisions from Gaza.
“They’ve been firing rockets nearly daily, at least weekly, in Israel,” former U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on CNN on Tuesday. “The Israelis have largely cleared the northern half, but it’s the southern half they have to go after as well. They’re doing operations. They still say they’re going after pockets of resistance in northern Gaza. But they had to get to the southern part. They have to clear out these tunnels. They now think that the tunnel system was 300 miles, maybe twice as long as that. And so it’s quite a complex problem, that type of urban warfare.”
“Unless Israel is willing to walk away from the fight right now and say to Hamas, ‘You’re left intact, your leadership, whatever capability you have remaining,’ then there’s going to continue to be severe losses,” he added. “I think the key is, do you have processes and procedures in place to limit them as much as possible? And continue to make those assessments about the value, the proportionality, etc., of a strike versus not conducting a strike.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has repeatedly supported Israel’s right to self-defense while also urging it to do more to protect civilians, spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, describing the situation in Gaza as “gut-wrenching.”
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The United States strongly disagrees with members of the Israeli far right who want to push Palestinians out of Gaza to resettle it. U.S. officials have pushed back on those arguments, while Netanyahu has also said Israel doesn’t intend to reoccupy the enclave.
Israel has also engaged in limited combat against Hezbollah, a more sophisticated and larger terrorist organization based in Lebanon, which is Israel’s northern neighbor. Hezbollah and Hamas are members of Iran’s “axis of resistance,” various groups that seek Israel’s destruction and the end of the Palestinian suffering in the war.
