In December of last year, Hamas held a celebration of the 31st anniversary of its founding. While photographs of the event showed a public square packed with enthusiastic participants, Hillel Frisch argues that the terrorist group isn’t nearly so popular as its leaders want people to believe:

Hamas refrained from holding its commemoration in Gaza’s largest square, the Square of the Unknown Soldier, choosing instead a smaller [venue] near the Islamic University, a Hamas stronghold, with an area of 21,000 square meters—compared to over 60,000 for the former.

Specialists in traffic flow . . . point to a two-person-by-square-meter measure as the high-end threshold of crowd safety. [A close look at pictures of the event therefore suggests that] the number of those participating could not have exceeded 42,000. . . . The number attending also explains why Hamas chose the smaller square. The shadow (and real) Hamas government has on its payroll 51,000 military and civilian employees, many of whom are beneficiaries of the $30 million in cash from Qatar distributed in Gaza. . .

Rest assured that these employees returned part of the money they received to Hamas to organize the event. These employees, as reluctant as they might have been to part with precious cash, no doubt realized that Qatar provided these funds because of Hamas’s feud with the Palestinian Authority—which has become wrapped up in Qatar’s own feud with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—rather than on humanitarian grounds. There are far needier Gazans than Hamas employees.

The crucial question is whether the organization will privilege meeting the needs of its bureaucracy, and thus keep the peace, [thanks to which Israel has allowed Qatari money to enter Gaza], or stick to the path of aggression it renewed in April 2018, with the March of Return demonstration. Qatar wants a tamer, but independent Hamas, [while] Iran wants bloodshed on Israel’s southern front. The problem is that Hamas needs the financial aid of both.

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.