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Israel: ï¿½Junkï¿½ Rocket, Potent Threat
Ina Friedman

It may not be able to carry much of a warhead, but the Qassam rocket could wreak utter havoc in Israel if Hamas manages to transfer its launch capabilities from Gaza to the West Bank

At 7:20 On the morning of August 24, Hamas's message that it was upping the ante -- again -- came in the form of a Qassam-2 rocket landing on the Zikim Beach, just south of the city of Ashkelon. Fortunately, the beach was deserted at that hour. But the initial relief quickly turned to consternation -- not just in Ashkelon but throughout Israel -- as the realization dawned that this rocketï¿½s real target, the Ashkelon Electric Power Station, is a mere kilometer (five-eighths of a mile) further to the north. Clearly, the objective of the launch was to hit a "strategic target" and give all Israelis a simultaneous taste of Hamas's power by disrupting the electricity supply nationwide -- to the degree that the 5-10 kilos of explosives carried by these rockets could inflict sufficiently serious damage.

Five days later, Hamas reinforced the point by sending a Qassam still further north, into Ashkelonï¿½s industrial zone -- an unprecedented and still more worrying nine kilometers from the Gaza launch point.

Until these dramatic developments, Hamasï¿½s use of Qassam rockets had become so routine that it often merited no more than a passing mention in the press. Over 150 of them, launched from portable shoot-and-run apparatuses, have rained down on Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and communities in the relatively sparcely populated western Negev since September 2000 -- 50 falling in the town of Sderot alone. Mercifully, less than a handful have scored direct hits, they have killed no one, and have done relatively little damage (except to an apartment building and a factory in Sderot, severely injuring one of its workers). Yet all these facts must be qualified by the words "so far."

And recently Israeli officials, army officers, and analysts have begun to fret not only that improvements in the rocketsï¿½ range will enable them to reach further into Israel, but that Hamas's ability to launch them from the West Bank is just months away.

If this plan succeeds, it will clearly escalate the conflict to untenable heights. Besides causing havoc in cities close to the Green Line -- like Kfar Saba, Ra'ananah and Petah Tikvah in the Tel Aviv area, and Jerusalem itself -- the advent of Qassams hitting the Israeli heartland would likely close the country to international air traffic. As Ya'akov Amidror, a retired general and former head of military intelligence, recently observed: "Can you see British Airways continuing it flights to Israel after the first Qassam falls on a runway at the [Ben-Gurion] airport?"

This specter has moved Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Yuval Steinetz of the Likud to declare the rockets' deployment in the West Bank a "strategic threat" -- with the proximity of launching points to central Israel making up for the rocketsï¿½ small size and lack of precision.

For the most part, the Qassams have, till now, been manufactured in the Gaza Strip in small workshops. Although the homemade missile-and mortar-industry was pioneered by Palestinian Authority officials -- specifically high-ranking members of Muhammad Dahlan's Gaza branch of the Preventive Security Service -- the Qassams have been employed almost exclusively by Hamas. Their manufacture in Gaza has been fostered by a steady supply of explosives and chemical materials from Egypt via the warren of tunnels running under the border in Rafah, at the southern end of the Strip.

Yet they've also cropped up in the West Bank. In February 2002, for example, a Qassam exploded in the Balata refugee camp, adjoining Nablus, immediately upon being launched (presumably at an army base south of the city). Later that month, eight other rockets were discovered in a truck stopped outside Nablus by Israeli troops, and in the following month 10 Qassams were uncovered in a workshop in Tul Karm, which is less than 15 kilometers from the outlying neighborhoods of Netanyah. Yet another one of the 1.8-meter long, metal rockets was found, ready for launching, last October in an open area of northern Samaria. Since then, as a senior army officer reported to the Knesset Defense Committee in August, Hamas has greatly beefed up its efforts to produce Qassams in the West Bank -- primarily in and around Nablus.

It matters little that the Qassam is what ballistic-missile expert Aryeh Stav of the Ariel Center for Policy Research derides as "a piece of metal junk." "A thousand years ago, the Chinese were already able to send missiles much further than the Qassam's range," Stav observes, "and an average mortar is more accurate and deadly than one of these homemade jobs." Nor is it particularly comforting that extending the Qassam's range (from an original 5-6 kms., to perhaps as much as 15 kms., for which purpose trial missiles were launched from Gaza in the direction of the Mediterranean in July) requires the reduction of its explosive payload. Or that "Hamas lacks the ability to greatly improve the technology," in the assessment of Anat Kurz, an expert in low-intensity warfare at Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies (JCC), "and is fairly close to the point of exhausting the Qassam's potential."

Quality, the terrorism experts agree, is not the issue here. "Most terrorism is based on junk," says Boaz Ganor, head of the Herzliyah-based International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT). "The destruction of two of the world's tallest buildings began with two box cutters" (the knives used by the al-Qaeda terrorists to hijack the planes on September 11). "Terrorism is designed not to wipe out large numbers of people but to frighten them," he adds pointedly. "So although the Qassams have little military value, if they cause citizens in Israel's heartland to hole up in their houses or shelters for fear of this ï¿½junk,ï¿½ they will have achieved their purpose."

The Qassam has not been a trouble-free strategy for Hamas. Since last summer, the use of rockets has drawn Israeli ground troops into the Gaza Strip to hunt down militants, destroy their workshops and level heavy vegetation that might provide cover in the launch areas. Missile-firing Apache helicopters have stalked, targeted and killed some of the perpetrators from the air -- driving Hamas activists to discard their cell phones (a means of tracking them), take on disguises, and generally go "underground." For a brief spell at the end of August, even the PA went into action to stop the Qassams, both by blocking a few of the Rafah tunnels and by dispatching squads to ambush militants trying to launch rockets from northern Gaza. (The PA says it fired on, but failed to capture, the Hamas men who launched the second Qassam at Ashkelon.)

So why does Hamas continue to cling to the Qassams when it has a far more terrifying -- and "successful" -- weapon against Israeli civilians: the suicide bomber?

One reason has to do with the organization's overall strategic aspirations, explains JCC analyst Yoram Schweitzer. "The inspiration for the Qassams came from Hizballah in Lebanon, and Hamas's aim is to obtain the same strategic ï¿½balance of deterrenceï¿½ that has made Israel think not twice but seven times before responding to Hizballah actions." Ultimately, Hizballah achieved this "balance" by obtaining advanced weaponry (such as long-range Katyusha rockets) from Iran and effectively showing that any attack on its men would result in rockets striking Israeli towns and villages. Now Hamas, Schweitzer suggests, is hoping to reach a similar position by manufacturing or acquiring better missiles, including Katyushas, from Hizballah or Iran.

Another reason is the electrifying effect the Qassams have had on Palestinian public opinion. Haifa University political scientist Dr. David Bakay notes that although these primitive rockets were first produced by elements in the PA, they have not been employed by Fatah for fear that their use could bring Israel's full wrath down on Yasser Arafat. "So Hamas has effectively cornered their use, and this has enabled its prestige to soar," he says. "The Qassams have turned the Hamas fighters into national heroes."

Kurz also notes that Hamas's basic goal is to block any movement toward political progress. "It may well be trying to force Israel to send ground forces into Gaza, just as it may have deliberately torpedoed the planned exit of Israeli troops from cities in the West Bank," she proposes. "Hamasï¿½s strategic ability must be measured by the degree to which it provokes Israel into taking actions that foil the road map."

Finally, there is a purely pragmatic reason for the present drive to extend the range of the Qassams and copy their use to the West Bank: Israel is moving to block other means of attack.

As Ganor explains, the entire history of Palestinian terrorism and Israel's counter efforts has been a game of technological cat-and-mouse. "When the introduction of metal detectors and air marshals prevented plane hijackings, Palestinian terrorists shifted to blowing up planes," he begins. "When Israel put up a sophisticated security fence on the Lebanese border, the PLO tried to use hand gliders and hot-air balloons to get around it," he continues. Hamas compensated for the long-standing security fence around Gaza Strip -- which has thwarted the dispatch of suicide bombers -- with homemade mortars and rockets. And now that it sees a West Bank security fence going up -- to block the bombers -- "it is increasingly eager to extend its Qassam capability to the West Bank."

The question now pressing Israeli strategists is how to prevent this. Rejecting the present strategy of a vigorous return to the targeted killings of Hamas militants since the collapse of the hudna inadequate and misguided, Stav offers a more comprehensive prescription. "We destroy one workshop, a militant or two, but it means nothing if they can start firing rockets again the next day," he argues. "Defeating this enemy means destroying its entire infrastructure. And a single battalion of paratroopers could do that -- without the casualties, and all the noise and fireworks, of helicopter-launched missiles." Israel, he maintains, has excellent intelligence on the Hamas infrastructure. ("Satellites," he says, "can photograph a pack of cigarettes from 100 kilometers up.")

The government's reluctance to choose this course, he believes, derives from the fear that "the world will come down on us." But Stav thinks this is exaggerated. "We'd have a problem with the U.S. State Department," he concedes, "but not with Congress or among the American people. We even have untapped support in Europe. What we lack," he laments, "are policy-makers capable of strategic thinking."

Others believe continuing to pursue a program of "targeted killings" -- especially of high-ranking figures in both the military and political wings of the terrorist organs -- will paralyze Hamas. "The way to deal with terrorism is to chop off the heads of the organizations, as was done long ago both in Europe and South America," says Bakay, citing the Shining Path in Peru as one example. "Now, 10 years too late, Israel is beginning to wake up to this fact."

Schweitzer not only concurs that eliminating Hamas leaders -- even those living in Syria, as Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon has threatened -- is the correct course. He believes it will lead to far-reaching political results: "Ultimately it will force the PA to see that it must act against the terror organizations, as called for in the road map, if wants to ensure its own existence."

The essence of the present problem, Schweitzer postulates, is that "the PA makes a claim to sovereignty but refuses to accept responsibility for enacting it" -- by cracking down on the armed Islamic opposition that is challenging its authority. Yet he believes that "Abu Mazen and [his security chief] Dahlan will inevitably realize that they must tackle the armed opposition, not for Israel's sake but for the sake of sovereign Palestinian interests."

"The necessary course is nothing short of a Palestinian civil war," Ganor echoes, using even sharper terms, "and there are no shortcuts. The PA tried to find one by entering into the hudna -- to avoid its road-map obligation to dismantle the Islamic terror organizations," he explains. "Abu Mazen calculated that if he could get Hamas and the Islamic Jihad to refrain from terror actions, he could say to the world: I've delivered the goods. Even if I haven't dismantled the terror infrastructure, there's no terror -- and that what you really care about. So now it's Israel's turn to deliver."

The problem, as Ganor sees it, is not just that Hamas and the Islamic Jihad executed a series of constantly escalating terror operations that climaxed in the August 19 Jerusalem bus bombing (which killed 21 Israelis and injured scores of others). On a broader plane, he explains, the PA has tried to buck a policy that prevails throughout the Arab world.

"Not a single Arab state allows a radical Islamic opposition, armed to the teeth, to act freely on its territory. They're all fighting against such forces -- except the PA," he observes. "It claims that it's incapable of doing so now, but it also said that five years ago, when it was in a much stronger position. And in another three years," Ganor reasons, "it will be even weaker than it is today. So it's in the PA's interest to embark on this course quickly."

September 22, 2003

Israel