Last month, terrorists in the northern part of the West Bank launched at least two rockets in the direction of central Israel, both of which fell short and caused no injuries. Nadav Shragai discusses this recent development with military experts, beginning with Uzi Rubin, one of the Jewish state’s foremost authorities on missile technology:

“That is precisely how it began in Gaza,” recalls the man who headed the . . . Israel Missile Defense Organization. . . . Rubin’s déjà-vu is firmly embedded in the striking similarity between what is occurring now in Judea and Samaria and what happened in the Gaza Strip between 2000 and 2002. “There too,” [Rubin said], “it began with shoddy homemade production, in garages and workshops. The locals in Gaza removed explosives from mines, mixed together makeshift explosives—which initially blew up on launch, and worked with hollow pipes from whatever materials they could lay their hands on. Gradually, they began to improve their capabilities and performance. The first Hamas rocket was launched at the town of Sderot on April 16, 2001.”

“Now a similar process might well be taking place in Judea and Samaria,” warns Rubin. “Though it might currently appear to be extremely insignificant and not threatening, but that is exactly how it began there too. We need to be extremely alert and to kill [the problem] off at birth,” he recommends, and then refers back to Gaza: “Just look and see to what dimensions the rocket threat in the south has developed.”

A senior Hamas figure, Saleh al-Arouri, who is responsible for the organization’s military activity in Judea and Samaria, has expressed a hope in the past that “the resistance in Judea and Samaria will succeed in obtaining rockets.” And when asked if this is actually possible, he responded that “In the Gaza Strip, rockets were manufactured under blockade, so in the West Bank too, we will be able to overcome all the difficulties and will succeed in producing rockets.”

Hossein Salami, the commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), also threatened last summer to turn Judea and Samaria into a base for launching rockets at Israel.

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.