Israel Is Also Facing Iran across the Gaza Border --What's at Stake

Those 40 km missiles Hamas is unleashing against Israeli cities are certainly not the “amateur rockets…nagging the residents” of Israeli cities, as a Palestinian journalist recently wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. And Hamas may still surprise Israel with longer-range missiles.

The press calls the rockets “Grads” or “Katyushas,” the Russian name given several generations ago to the original Soviet-made surface-to-surface missiles. Today, it would be more correct to label some of the missiles by their real name, the “Arash,” the name given to them by their Iranian manufacturers. The long-range 120 mm mortars (pictured) raining down on Israel are also Iranian in origin. The mortars are equipped with auxiliary motors to increase their range from six to ten kilometers, reports the IICC think tank.

The Jerusalem Post reports today that the longest range Grads were manufactured in China and that some of them were smuggled to Hamas via Iran. Visitors to Sderot's rocket heap (like Mr. Obama above) can view Iranian-made weapons.

Earlier this year both the Iranian Arashes and mortars were fired from Gaza with deadly results. In February 2008 the mortars were fired at Kibbutz Sa’ad; in June the mortars were used against Kibbutz Nirim, killing one and wounding four, and in November, eight soldiers were wounded by such a mortar at Nahal Oz. The Arash missiles were fired against Ashkelon on several occasions during 2008.

The Long History of Palestinian-Iranian Cooperation

The Islamic Republic worked closely with Yasser Arafat for decades, particularly after the Oslo agreements granted Arafat a foothold in the Palestinian territories. Arafat’s relationship with Ayatollah Khomeini predates the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Former CIA senior officer Robert Baer details the Iranian-Palestinian relationship in See No Evil, The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism. “Arafat had put his entire worldwide terrorist network at Iran’s disposal,” Baer pointed out. “Having been forced out of Beirut in 1982 by the Israelis, he had handed it over lock, stock, and barrel to the Iranians for safekeeping.”

The liaison between Arafat and Iran was maintained by none other than master terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, a former member of Arafat’s Force 17, the mastermind of anti-American bombings in Lebanon, the man behind the bombings of Israeli and Jewish institutions in Argentina, and the alleged chief planner for the 2006 Hizbullah war against Israel. Mughniyeh met a just end when he was killed in his car by a bomb in a Damascus suburb in February 2008.

Iran undertook a major operation to supply weapons to the Palestinians. Click to see the massive inventory of the Santorini and Karine-A ships captured by Israel in 2001 and 2002, including dozens of Arash missiles and hundreds of 120 mm mortars. After the capture of the ships, it can be assumed that Iran dispatched new arms shipments which made their way to Gaza through the Sinai tunnels and other seaborne smuggling efforts. Shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles and the anti-tank Saggers were also captured on the ships, and they too are presumably now in the Palestinian arsenal and will be used against Israeli aircraft and tanks.

Was the Islamic University in Gaza also an Iranian Base?

When Israeli air force jets bombed the Islamic University in the Gaza, the BBC declared that “a significant cultural symbol for Hamas” had been hit. It is evident that the university was also a major part of Hamas’ weapons development and storage network.

“The Islamic University was used as a base for Hamas gunmen,” a Fatah [Fatah, not Israeli!] spokesman told the New York Times in February 2008. “We didn’t attack the university because it was a university, but because gunmen were firing from there.”

A year earlier, Fatah-affiliated security officers captured an Iranian general at the school. They claimed he was “supervising the manufacturing weapons and explosives for Hamas,” according to Yediot Ahranot. “The source told Ynet that the expert was in charge of several labs in the university, mainly chemistry labs in which he trained Hamas activists, most of them women, manufacturing the explosives. At least five Iranian citizens were arrested during a raid at the Islamic University, a Hamas stronghold in Gaza City. Hundreds of weapons and a lathe for the production of Qassam rockets were seized in the raid. The Palestinian source added that at least 20 women, some of them students, were arrested in the labs supervised by the Iranian expert, who was mainly involved in developing shells and rockets, but also explosives. “

The Islamic University in Gaza was also a center for Hamas recruitment and training, according to other accounts.

If and when Israeli ground troops enter Gaza they will encounter extensive Hamas bunker and tunnel systems. Hundreds of Hamas tunnels from the Sinai keep Gaza armed and fed. Two years ago tunnels were used to attack an IDF unit and capture Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. But it should be recalled that the use of tunnels and extensive bunkers were tactics taught by Hizbullah and the Iranians. In July 2006, a garrulous officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard revealed to the Arabic publication Sharq al Awsat that Iranian diplomats smuggled North Korean experts into Lebanon under the guise of "domestic workers." They joined "hundreds of Iranian engineers and technicians… to build a 25 kilometer [!] tunnel." The officer did not reveal the location but bragged "each opening in this [tunnel] measures 12 to 18 square meters, and has a mobile floor and a semi-mobile ceiling. Each four openings are connected by a passage that allows fighters to pass easily [from one opening] to the other."

Israel is not facing a ragtag band of Palestinian thugs. (One silly analyst actually rejected the Israeli claim of “self-defense.” The Gaza war is the confrontation of “a state and a networked organization,” she wrote, “like the US Army fighting the Salvation Army.”)

No, this confrontation is yet another round of Israel versus Iran and its proxies. It is a lengthy war fought in the open in Gaza and Lebanon and fought in the shadows in attacks against Israeli and Jewish institutions in Buenos Aires, or against the weapons supply routes between Iran, Syria and Hizbullah, or in the assassination of a master terrorist in Damascus. In such a war, cease-fires can only be a temporary respite, at best, not a basis for peace.

Michael Young, the editorial editor at the Beirut Daily Star, provides this perspective from his precarious perch:

"What we see developing in the Middle East is an accelerating counterattack by non-state actors such as Hamas, Hizbullah and the Islamic Jihad, all backed by a rising Iran, against the majority of Arab states committed to a negotiated peace with Israel. Manipulating the emotions that the fate of the Palestinians invariably release among Arabs, Tehran above all, but also the militant Islamist groups, are attempting to redraw the regional balance of power through a normalization of the armed struggle against Israel and a delegitimization of Arab states opposed to this."

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