In May, Israel and Hamas—along with Hamas’s terrorist ally/rival Islamic Jihad—agreed to a six-month ceasefire after Hamas had launched several hundred rockets into Israeli territory, killing four. Rather than using the guarantee of peace and quiet to focus on civilian concerns—schools, unemployment, and the like—Hamas and Islamic Jihad are doing what they’ve always done, writes Khaled Abu Toameh: loading up on guns and missiles.

It seems, then, that for Islamic Jihad and Hamas, the ceasefire understandings, reached under the auspices of Egypt and the UN, are meant to give the Gaza-based groups a chance to continue building their military capabilities without having to worry about Israeli retaliatory measures.

Apparently, Islamic Jihad and Hamas do not perceive the ceasefire as an opportunity to improve the living conditions of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. From all accounts, they are not planning to seize the lull in the fighting to brainstorm on ways to lower the crippling unemployment rate or raise the abysmal standard of living.

Such features of basic decent governance have not found their way onto the agenda of these two groups for the past twelve years. And evidently, they are not making it onto the agenda in the foreseeable future. No time for that: the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad are otherwise occupied—with the destruction of Israel; the Palestinian people be damned.

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.