In 2018, Palestinians in Gaza began organizing mass demonstrations along the barrier with Israel, with Hamas operatives joining in by attacking Israeli soldiers and trying to breach the barrier. These protests petered out in the following year, achieving little besides a fawning report from Amnesty International, the deaths of over 100 Palestinians, and Jerusalem’s decision to expand the fishing zone on the Gaza coast. A few days ago, Hamas began organizing these demonstrations anew. Khaled Abu Toameh explains why:

The latest attacks on Israelis by Hamas, however, appear to be less linked to Israel, which has taken a series of measures over the past two years to boost the economy and improve the living conditions of the Palestinians in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Those measures include issuing work permits in Israel for more than 17,000 Palestinians.

Hamas is now sending Palestinians to get killed or injured on the border with Israel because it is apparently upset with its friends in Qatar, the Gulf state that has long been supporting the Muslim Brotherhood organization, of which Hamas is an offshoot. Hamas is evidently taken aback because Qatar has reduced the monthly financial grant it has been providing to the Islamist movement in the Gaza Strip over the past five years.

The controversy surrounding the financial grant is yet another example of how Palestinian leaders (in this instance Hamas) regularly sacrifice their young people for the sake of money. The leaders of Hamas, most of whom lead comfortable lives in Qatar, Turkey, and Lebanon, appear to care little about Palestinians getting killed or injured while attacking Israeli troops. What they do appear to care about is how to enrich themselves and their families and continue the jihad (holy war) to destroy Israel. They also appear not to care if thousands of Palestinian workers are unable to enter Israel every day for work because of the violence along the border.

As we mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, Israeli special forces carried out a daring boots-on-the-ground raid on September 8 targeting the Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC) in northwestern Syria. The site was used for producing and storing missiles which are then transferred to Hizballah in Lebanon. Jonathan Spyer notes that the raid was accompanied by extensive airstrikes in Syira,and followed a few days later by extensive attacks on Hizballah in Lebanon, one of which killed Mohammad Qassem al-Shaer, a senior officer in the terrorist group’s Radwan force, an elite infantry group. And yesterday, the IDF destroyed a weapons depot, an observation post, and other Hizballah positions. Spyer puts these attacks in context:

The direct purpose of the raid, of course, was the destruction of the facilities and materials targeted. But Israel also appeared to be delivering a message to the Syrian regime that it should not imagine itself to be immune should it choose to continue its involvement with the Iran-led axis’s current campaign against Israel.

Similarly, the killing of al-Shaer indicated that Israel is no longer limiting its response to Hizballah attacks to the border area. Rather, Hizballah operatives in Israel’s crosshairs are now considered fair game wherever they may be located in Lebanon.

The SSRC raid and the killing of al-Shaer are unlikely to have been one-off events. Rather, they represent the systematic broadening of the parameters of the conflict in the north. Hizballah commenced the current round of fighting on October 8, in support of Hamas in Gaza. It has vowed to stop firing only when a ceasefire is reached in the south—a prospect which currently seems distant.