After three rockets were fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip on Dec. 7, 2019, the Israeli military said in a statement that it had launched retaliatory airstrikes targeting military camps and a naval base belonging to the Hamas terrorist organization.
Some 2,600 rockets and mortars have been fired into Israel from Gaza over the past two years. These are not crude Qassams – metal tubes filled with fertilizer explosives built in a garage workshop. Hamas now has home-grown rocket production lines in Gaza, as well as a drone workshop to produce knockoff Iranian surveillance and weaponized unmanned aerial vehicles. It continually conducts tests, firing rockets out into the Mediterranean, in an attempt to improve the accuracy and range of their designs.
While Hamas has made extraordinary efforts to establish its local arms industry, it still must receive infusions of weapons and technology to sustain its war against Israel. Certain components, such as fiberglass, targeting kits and surveillance equipment for drones, are beyond its ability to manufacture. And the terrorist organization faces some significant challenges in this regard.
In December 2016, Hamas aviation engineer Mohamed Zouari was shot and killed in Tunisia. An aerial drone specialist, Zouari was also developing unmanned underwater vehicles in Tunis, according to published reports. One of the missions Hamas likely had in mind for these UUVs is attacking Israeli pipelines and offshore gas platforms off the Haifa coast.
Another Palestinian engineer, Fadi al-Batsh, was killed in Malaysia on April 20, 2018. At his funeral in Gaza, he was eulogized as an "engineer commander" of Hamas' Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, and by another speaker as a commander in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist organization.
Truck convoys bearing weapons believed to have been headed to the Egypt-Gaza border were hit in Sudan in 2009 and 2012 by aircraft, presumably Israeli. Iran, too, has attempted to provide munitions to Hamas, via huge shipments aboard cargo vessels like the Klos C (2014) and the Victoria (2011) and through tunnels that originate on the Egyptian side of the Gaza border.
However, it appears that Hamas and its Iranian patron may have found an answer in the experiences of international drug cartels, North Korea and Iran – all of which have developed low-profile, "semi-submersible" and mini-submarine vessels for smuggling or insertion of special forces.
For Hamas, naval operations are nothing new.
For several years, flotation devices and barrels filled with weapons were dropped into the waters off the Gaza coast and then picked up by Gazan operatives using fishermen’s boats. (This may explain why Israel is forever changing Gaza’s fishing boundaries.)
Hamas takes great pride in its naval commandos; during the 2014 Gaza war, several units were dispatched from Gaza to attack Israeli communities. They were all intercepted on the beach and killed. Today, the naval commando unit is considered by the Palestinians to be one of Hamas’s most elite forces.
Despite the failures in 2014, Palestinian factions in Gaza continue to train and extol their naval commandos. In 2017, Israel intercepted wetsuits hidden among shipments of clothes permitted to enter Gaza.
The bases of these naval commandos, including the one targeted on Dec. 8, may not attract general attention, but are very prominent on the IDF's target lists. Why?
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