Although Hamas has fired over 4,000 rockets at Israel, casualties have been few, and the IDF appears to have done much in the past two weeks to degrade the terrorist group’s military infrastructure. But Hamas could do much more damage in the future if Hizballah and other Iranian proxies join in the fighting. David Horovitz argues that the Jewish state’s tactical superiority doesn’t eliminate the need to create a better strategy for containing its dangerous neighbor:

[T]he complexities of attempting to thwart a terror-state’s rocket fire, cynically launched from the midst of a civilian population, have undermined Israel’s international standing, with numerous world leaders and opinion-shapers maliciously or lazily comparing death tolls and concluding that because Israel’s is lower, it must be the aggressor. . . . How dare Israel have an Iron Dome missile-defense system, these critics object—implying that if only Israel were suffering more fatalities, this might be a fairer fight and Israel might merit less castigation.

Also to Hamas’s delight, the tide of hostility to Israel, which even the best public diplomacy could only partially alleviate, is playing out in displays of anti-Semitism, deeply troubling and discomfiting Diaspora Jewry.

From round to round of conflict, Hamas has grown from a dangerous terrorist organization to the ruler of a terrorist state with what amounts to an army—funded in part by the money that Israel has allowed Hamas’s Qatari patrons to deliver. It is increasingly dominating the Palestinian cause, harming Israel’s international standing, and demonstrating the capacity to stoke violence against Israel on multiple fronts. The people of Israel are indeed strong and courageous, and disciplined and resilient under relentless fire.

But our enemies in Gaza have not yet concluded that they’re wasting their time. To use the metaphoric fable, they think of Israel as a frog in slowly boiling water. They must be disabused. What’s required is a sea-change in which, rather than allowing Hamas to cast us into rounds of chaos at moments of its choosing, with ever-widening repercussions, Israel determines its long-term goals, sets about achieving them, and reasserts control of its own reality and destiny.

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.