Last weekend, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fired a barrage of rockets from the Gaza Strip at the Israeli town of Sderot; the Iron Dome system intercepted most of them, but one damaged a house. The IDF responded with airstrikes, mostly on Hamas targets. While both PIJ and Hamas receive support from Iran, PIJ is more closely tied to Tehran. Yaakov Lappin investigates its motivation:

PIJ has both an interest in destabilizing the security situation with rocket fire and the ability to do so. [At the moment], Hamas is holding out for the results of negotiations with Egypt and the UN aimed at preventing an economic collapse in Gaza. PIJ, in contrast, has no such concerns. It is more than willing to use its rocket arsenal, which is larger than that of Hamas, to upset the security situation.

Iranian funding and rocket production knowhow has helped make PIJ a significant terror army, with some 15,000 armed operatives (compared to Hamas’s 25,000-strong military wing). . . . Since May 2019, PIJ has significantly stepped up attempts to launch attacks against Israel out of Gaza. Most of those attempts have been thwarted, but many more attack plots remain, and the organization’s intent is crystal-clear.

The Israeli defense establishment is focusing its readiness on the northern front, where Iran and Hizballah are seeking to build new attack capabilities. These include upgrading Hizballah’s rocket arsenal into precision-guided missiles in Lebanon and entrenching Iran’s attack bases throughout Syria. Israel is actively working to disrupt both of these Iranian objectives. To help it achieve this mission, Israel is prioritizing the north over Gaza. That formula has held up until now, but if PIJ remains determined to rock the boat, it could collapse into yet another Gaza war.

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.