Enough rockets fired in salvos are able to overwhelm Israel’s Iron Dome anti missile defense. How and from where to the Palestinians get so many rockets?
A lot of parts are smuggled and/or assembled or manufactured in simple machine shops. We are talking about steel cylinders, sugar, fertilizer, and TNT, not ICBMs. There was a long interview, which I cannot immediately find, in the New Yorker or similar with some of the young people paid (not much! but at least it’s a job) to melt TNT on the stove and pour it into warheads by hand, etc. You can make a rocket like this for $500 or not much more, so getting hundreds or even thousands is not a problem.
Also smuggled in from Syria and Iraq.
They are getting them mainly from Iran (parts and funding). As to how, they have built extensive networks of tunnels from the Sinai to bring in equipment, parts and all sorts of other things. As folks up thread noted, these aren’t sophisticated rockets…more like the WWII era Russia katyusha rockets (the Soviets built literally millions of the things).
Thanks, I thought they were something like scuds.
Scuds weren’t that good either. It’s quite possible that the light damage dome by Scuds in Gulf War 1.0 wasn’t mainly because of Patriot missiles but because trying to hit Israeli cities from Iraq with a Scud is like trying to shoot someone at 1km with hip fire. The world is an unimaginably big place and even cities are small within it.
Some knowledge of chemistry and being handy in a workshop is all that’s required for making the kind of rockets the Pals use. Once they figure out how to give them guidance updates or have them fly low though, that will be bad. Fortunately, Israel may have a fair amount of time to prepare because doing things the smart way isn’t Arab militaries’ forte.
They are essentially unguided, which makes them simpler and cheaper, but they also fall indiscriminately.
I’m not sure I’d say that; They’re pretty anti-Semitic.
Yes, but they’ve killed Druze as well as Jews.
How are these things smuggled in? Isn’t there a huge giant wall that is 100% effective in keeping bad things out?
Right, some of the rockets are made in Gaza, while others are made in Syria, Iran, etc. A Scud missile can have a range of several hundred kilometers, but the types of rockets launched at Israel recently have ranges of a hundred and something kilometers or even less and are unguided. The point is that there are many thousands of them. Gazan organizations also invest in mortars, anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles, drones and the like.
As a serious response: while the Israel-Gaza border is indeed locked tight, the Egypt-Gaza border is much more porous, and of course it’s always possible to smuggle stuff in by sea. It just goes to show that even if a wall is 100% effective, it’s only effective were there is, in fact, a wall.
Respectfully, I think this could be a dangerous line of thinking. I’m a mechanical engineer, and I’ve been struck by how many Islamic terrorists share my educational background. It may be a mistake to assume that Palestinian knowledge is what’s preventing accurate rocket fire from raining down on Israel. IMHO, the people designing Palestinian rockets aren’t dumb; they’re just resource-constrained.
Building a guided rocket isn’t exactly roc—uh, it’s not as hard as it might seem. A cell phone has both a GPS receiver and enough accelerometers/gyroscopes to act as a decent INS (inertial navigation system) in the event that GPS signals are being jammed. You can write the requisite code to run as an app on the phone…a lot of the electronics work has been done. Then you just need to hook up a few servos to a set of fins and write a PID routine to operate them, and you’ve got a crude guided missile.
I’ve read that Bin Laden was somewhat surprised when the towers fell on 9/11. I believe that he was surprised, but I’d be shocked if he hadn’t anticipated that it might happen. He was trained as a civil engineer, and that education would give him everything he needed to know to figure out that collapse was a real possibility.
It’s not so far-fetched to think that a Palestinian engineer could cobble together a crude-but-effective guided missile. And a large R/C aircraft would be even easier to convert into a small (self-guided) cruise missile.
The Israeli authorities know this and the Palestinians must as well. I don’t know why we haven’t seen reports of guided rockets yet, but it seems like a mistake to think they’re not coming soon.
I think they’ve tried a few of those; however, as drones are much slower than missiles, they’re easily shot down by helicopters and regular AA batteries.
It’s possible but if I accept that premise, I have a difficult time understanding how come Hezbollah isn’t using improvised guided missiles more often. ISIS got oil revenue and recruits from first world countries and they weren’t known for using guided missiles often. They had a kind of guided munition in kamikazi attacks but that uses up your (evidently) most dedicated personnel.
ETA: Or other Islamist factions which you wouldn’t expect to be as resource-constrained as the Pals. Even Arab militaries aren’t that big on using guided missiles although they did use them to great effect against the Eilat in '67 and Israeli tanks in '73.
Nap-of-the-earth or at least low altitude flying isn’t sufficient to have a good probability of evading those?
How come they don’t use land drones? A remote controlled car bomb seems like it could pose a real problem for checkpoints or to slip through/create breaches in fences/walls. The IRA used a remote controlled tractor carrying a mortar and if you look at IRA weapons, some of them look as improvised as what you’d find in Fallout.
Dude, most people on this forum barely think of Palestinians as functional human beings and MichaelEmouse is a racist of long standing.
Necessity is the mother of invention. That’s always been true since humans* became sentient.
*No matter how much some might perfer to deny Palestinians humanity.
I guess a question I have is what made the Palestinian militants go off right now? Was it a reaction to something specific? Was it to show the people that they’re still resisting? Did they want to create an overreaction and suck other regional powers like Syria and Iran into the fray politically, even if not militarily?
While we certainly have our racists, I really don’t think they’re the majority on this board - or perhaps I haven’t been looking in the right places?
IIRC, a sniper shot and wounded a couple of soldiers on the Israeli side, Israel blew up a Hamas post in response, and things escalated from there. Inasmuch as anyone on the Palestinian side (or the Israeli side, for that matter) actually has a strategy, while there is the matter of ratcheting up the pressure on Israel during Independence Day celebrations this week and the Eurovision contest next week, it probably has more to do with internal Palestinian politics and Qatari money.