Seconds made the difference early on Wednesday morning between a new war in Gaza and retaining Israel’s present policy of containment and negotiation.
It was 3.39am in Beer Sheva when the air raid sirens went off. Miri Tamano rushed to get her children — aged 9, 10, and 12 — into the reinforced shelter, moments before a Grad mid-range missile, launched from Gaza, struck their house, half-destroying it.
The Tamano family emerged, shocked but unscathed, and Israel responded with 20 air strikes on Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad targets along the Gazan coastal strip.
Their targets included a weapons manufacturing facility, an attack tunnel and other military installations — all of which showed Israel was sticking to its practice of the last three-and-a-half years by attacking only unmanned targets, so as not to escalate matters with Hamas.
One Palestinian fighter was killed at 8.30am when an unidentified team trying to fire a mortar near the border was hit by an Israeli aircraft. Following that, both sides held their fire.
But had the rocket on Beer Sheva caught the Tamano family in their beds, Israel would have exacted a much more devastating price.
But who launched the rocket at Be’er Sheva and a second one towards the Tel Aviv urban area that landed in the Mediterranean?
Hamas and PIJ put out an irregular joint statement that they had not fired either. Israeli officers made it clear that “only Hamas and PIJ have the kind of rocket that hit Be’er Sheva”, but did not rule out the possibility that they had been fired by “rogue elements”.
It is hard to imagine that Yihya Sinwar, Hamas’s chief in Gaza, had no connection to the use of these rockets in his fiefdom. But the element of deniability serves both sides, interested as they are in preventing a major escalation.
The rockets were fired while a large team of Egyptian negotiators were sleeping in Gaza City. They had arrived in yet another attempt to finalise the long-term agreement, on the table for months now, to ease Israel and Egypt’s border closures in return for a Palestinian commitment to a long-term ceasefire.
It may have been the difficulty in sealing the deal — due to misgivings on both sides and the refusal of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to sign off any agreement that bypasses his Palestinian Authority — that spurred the “rogue elements” to fire the rockets.
The protests near Gaza’s borders, orchestrated by Hamas, have not supplied sufficient pressure to force Israel, and President Abbas, into agreeing its negotiation demands. Someone may have thought that a couple of rockets would do the job.
Their rude awakening did not make the Egyptian negotiators’ work any easier. They left Gaza on Wednesday evening; meetings scheduled in Israel for Kamal Abbas, the commander of Egyptian intelligence, were cancelled.
In Israel itself, the call for a more forceful response increased, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning in a visit to the region that “Israel will act with great force” and Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman promising to demand a new offensive against Hamas during the next cabinet meeting.
But the politicians’ tough talk barely covers the reality that the Israeli government is anxious to reach a deal with Hamas. With an election close and the realisation that another major operation cannot last indefinitely, there are few alternatives.
