Introduction
On the morning of 7 October 2023, the Hamas military wing, the Ezz al-Din al-Qassam brigades, fired around 5,000 missiles and rockets into the area surrounding Gaza as part of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. The barrage focused mainly on the headquarters and bases of Israel’s “Gaza division.” The purpose of firing such a large number of missiles compared to previous engagements (2008-2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021),
was to provide air cover for the ground incursions of the brigades’ fighters into the bases and kibbutzim in the Gaza envelop. This manoeuvre marked the first large-scale face-to-face military confrontation between the Qassam Brigades and the Israeli occupation army and, hence, a radical change to the previously existing rules of engagement. As the operational plan of the offensive played out, it became clear that the brigades had achieved the elements of surprise and shock, which contributed to delaying the Israeli army’s response both to the offensive on the ground and to the intensity of the missilery piercing Israeli defence systems and, above all, the Iron Dome system.
Once Israel had absorbed the shock, it attacked Gaza by land, sea, and air, stating that its aim was to wipe out Hamas and end its regime in the Strip. It is important to underscore, here, the asymmetric nature of this military confrontation. This is not an engagement between two states and their respective standing armies, but between a national liberation movement with a paramilitary wing and the armed forces of a state. This is evident in the disparity between the two sides’ military capacities and in the tactics and strategies the Palestinian resistance forces have been applying in face of the brute force of the Israeli war machine.
In response to the full-scale assault on Gaza, the Palestinian resistance fired more barrages of missiles and rockets at Israeli towns in the Gaza environs and beyond, as Hamas authorities stated in their military communiques. Israel had unleashed a particularly vindictive aerial bombardment indiscriminately targeting residential buildings and other civilian structures. It had also begun a limited ground incursion along a few axes in Gaza. Palestinian forces fought back tenaciously while continuing to fire salvos of their homemade rockets into Israel. Every salvo triggered sirens in Israeli cities and the Iron Dome, Israel’s main defence against the resistance’s missiles, kicked in. Even so, many of the rockets made it through, falling on towns in the Gaza environs and other cities (Greater Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Safed and Eilat), causing material and human losses – albeit of a scale not remotely comparable to the damage the Israeli war machine was inflicting on Gaza.
These breakthroughs raise questions, firstly, about the resistance’s ability to develop its missilery from rudimentary unguided rockets to missiles with greater destructive power and equipped with sophisticated guiding systems, and secondly, about the efficacy of the Iron Dome against the resistance’s missiles and, accordingly, its ability to protect the inhabitants of Israel’s urban areas should the scope of the confrontation between Israel and the Palestinian resistance expand in the framework of the current conflict or in the event of a future round. Should Hezbollah and other Palestinian factions enter the fray, Israel would be exposed to missile fire from both the northern and the southern fronts.
