Thursday night, Islamic Jihad, an Iran-backed group based in Gaza, fired rockets at the area around Tel Aviv; the IDF responded promptly with airstrikes, and the rocket-fire soon ceased. Hamas, which governs Gaza, canceled the weekly Friday border riots out of apparent eagerness to avoid a confrontation with Israel. Meanwhile, Gazans have begun protesting their declining standards of living and lack of freedom, leading Hamas to suppress the demonstrations with live ammunition, arrests, and beatings. Eyal Zisser writes:

Iran, which controls [Islamic Jihad] and its leaders, and which gives it money and provides it with the type of missiles used in Thursday’s attack, is directly responsible. Iran doesn’t hide its desire to spark a conflagration in Gaza with the aim of sabotaging and even halting Israel’s efforts to dislodge
the Islamic Republic from Syria. The Iranians also want to embarrass Israel . . . by exploiting the fact that this is a sensitive period, ahead of the upcoming April 9 general election.

Hamas, however, is also responsible for the missile attack, because it hasn’t taken action against Islamic Jihad and other recalcitrant groups in Gaza, which continue targeting Israel. Hamas lends a hand to the escalation along the border [in the form of weekly riots and the launching of explosives carried by kites and balloons] as a matter of routine, hoping to improve its negotiating position with Israel and to receive aid dollars from Qatar.

In this regard, the missile attack [near Tel Aviv] indicates the collapse of this conception and essentially of the illusion—created by Hamas and Israel alike—that it’s possible to control the flames Hamas is fanning along the Gaza border and prevent them from spreading. At the end of the day, those who shoot at Israeli communities near Gaza will also shoot at Tel Aviv.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.