8 Things To Know For August 25

Droning on and on: 8 things to know for August 25

1. Drone wars: Israel carried out airstrikes on Iranian forces in Syria late Saturday night, but unlike the case with other such strikes, it quickly owned up to them, with the IDF alleging a massive plot by Iran to fly explosives-laden drones into the country and carry out attacks.

• Army spokesman Jonathan Cornicus is quoted telling AFP that while Iranian forces had launched rockets and missiles at Israel from Syria three times during 2018, the use of “kamikaze” drones set to explode on their targets was a new and “different tactic.”

• He is quoted in AP saying that the army believed the attack was “imminent,” and that the army had seen Iran try to execute it on Thursday and again Saturday night.

• The news agency says the attack “appeared to be one of the most intense attacks by Israeli forces in several years of hits on Iranian targets in Syria,” though there is not much indication as to how many sites were struck, or casualties.

2. An enigma wrapped in a stronghold: While Israel was open about striking inside Syria — a rarity — reports of drones falling and exploding in Beirut hours later are shrouded in an equal amount of mystery.

• Former military official Amos Yadlin tells Army Radio that he does not think the drones were actually Israeli. “Maybe they were trying to take off from there,” he theorizes.

3. IRGsee you: What Israelis are really interested in, though, is trying to figure out how this figures into the larger Iran-Israel conflict.

• Writing for ToI, Avi Issacharoff says that Israel has taken a leading role in a wider Sunni effort against Iranian plans for hegemony across the region: “Israel is not going to just allow them to put a foothold where they want. And this means that the level of fighting between Iran and Israel will only ratchet higher and higher. Along the way, it may change shape in some ways, and it’s possible instead of drones we’ll see an Iranian attempt to take revenge through some other sort of attack.”
• In Haaretz, Amos Harel describes the drone plot as designed to avenge reported Israeli attacks on Iranian sites in Iraq, and says the question now is whether and how Iran will try again.
• “If it turns out that Iranians were killed in the Israeli strike, including senior officials, the chances of revenge will grow,” he writes.

• In Ynet, Ron Ben Yishai describes Iran’s plot in almost comical terms, noting that an Iranian publication on Thursday claimed Israel was in for a drone attack, though that attempt had already failed: “It seems someone didn’t update the Iranian analyst.”
• “I wouldn’t want to be [IRGC Quds Force head Qassem] Soleimani now,” Yadlin quips to Army Radio. “The whole world knows he failed again.”

4. Blabberbomber: Part of the reason the whole world knows is because Israel was not shy about the strikes it had carried out. That includes a tweet sent out by the government in Persian with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s threatening words against Iran accompanied by a video purporting to show a building in flames after the attack.

• But not everybody thinks Israel should be talking so loudly. Former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon tells Kan radio that he thinks Netanyahu is trying to use the attack for political purposes: We had a lot of attacks like these and we didn’t run to tell everyone about it.”

• Avigdor Liberman, another former defense minister and political rival, also thinks Netanyahu should have shut his yapper: “The bragging is unnecessary, we need to maintain ambiguity.”

• Ynet’s Ben Yishai surmises that the public declaration was aimed more at Iran than at Israeli voters. “Israel chose to expose its operations to warn the Iranians from trying something like it in the future, and to show them how much [Israeli] intelligence has penetrated their operation.”

• Alon Ben David writes for Channel 13 news that Israel seems to have returned to its policy of ambiguity, pointing to the fog surrounding the Beirut drones.

5. Without Rina: The Syrian sorties came after a weekend that saw a deadly attack on a family at a spring outside the West Bank settlement of Dolev.

• Rina Shnerb, 17, was killed in the bomb attack and her father and brother injured. A picture of Rina takes up almost the whole front page of Yedioth Ahronoth, which also runs a headline mourning “A hole left in the heart of the nation” by her death.

• Many of the stories on the family surround an emotional hospital reunion Saturday night between father Eitan Shnerb and his son Dvir after spending Shabbat being treated for wounds they sustained in the blast.
• “We cried after hours in which I didn’t know how he was and was really scared,” Israel Hayom quotes the father saying. “He told me he can’t imagine the world without Rina and I told him we need to stay strong.”

6. West Bank dangers: Israeli forces spent the weekend searching for the perpetrators, and made some arrests, but have not announced that they found the main suspects.

• Channel 12 news quotes Palestinian security officials saying they believe that given the sophistication of the attack, it was likely the work of an organized cell and not a lone wolf, which they call a “dangerous” development.

• In Haaretz, Harel notes that taken together with other attacks in the West Bank recently, including a foiled Hamas bomb plot, “It seems this isn’t just a spontaneous wave of individual terrorists, but a sign of local cells getting together, some of them associated with terror groups and operating with the avid encouragement of the West Bank division of Hamas headquarters in Gaza.”
• In Israel Hayom, Nadav Shragai claims that just as important a common denominator is the fact that “all the recent attackers … are suckling from the same religious source, the same modern blood libel that ‘Al-Aqsa is in danger,” accusing both the PA and Hamas of spreading inciting lies.
• In Yedioth, Shimrit Meir writes that if Israeli authorities don’t get a handle on the uptick in violence, they will have a dangerous development to contend with: “The Gazaization of Judea and Samaria.”