While one might conclude from Western media that widespread poverty in the Gaza Strip is the result of the blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt to stop Hamas, which rules the area, from smuggling weapons, in fact a massive two-way traffic in goods passes through the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing every day. Moreover, Israel allows Qatar to supply Hamas with billions of dollars in cash, not to mention United Nations aid. A far greater contribution to Gaza’s woes comes from the Palestinian Authority (PA), which has imposed a blockade of its own—a result of the feud between Hamas and the PA’s ruling Fatah party. Gidon Ben-Zvi writes, that the PA president Mahmoud Abbas has cut welfare payments in Gaza (which still run through Ramallah) and slashed funding for electricity. And that’s not all:

[N]early two million Palestinians have been paying the price for the political rivalry between his ruling Fatah faction in the West Bank and the Hamas Islamist terrorist group in Gaza.

[After the Hamas takeover of the Strip in 2007], the Palestinian Authority began ratcheting up economic pressure on Hamas by making life more difficult for Gazans, including, for example, by banning banks in the West Bank from transferring money to residents in the Strip. Indeed, human-rights groups have documented arrests [for this crime]. Abbas has similarly refused to deliver international aid intended for Gaza.

All the while the PA kept paying tens of thousands of its Gaza-based employees, despite most of them not having worked since Hamas seized control of the territory in 2007. Then, these salaries were suddenly cut in 2018. Around the same time, Abbas also slashed the salaries of thousands of Gaza’s civil servants and required many others to leave their jobs. This has, as a corollary, contributed to the high unemployment and poverty rates in Gaza.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.