BY MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN

Israel has a critical gap in its protection system, said Yaakov Amidror, a former head of Military Intelligence’s Research Department and currently a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies.

He told The Jerusalem Post that if a rocket is shot at a location less than a few kilometers away, “we don’t have enough time to intercept it.”

Amidror explained that there is nothing unique about these particular rockets – “they are within the capabilities of the Iron Dome.”

The challenge is that sometimes, such as in the case of the rocket that hit the vehicle near Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, “from the point of view of the system, this was an open area without people. We don’t intercept such rockets.”

Amidror said that the rockets currently being fired at Israel had either been smuggled into the Gaza Strip before the 2013 regime change in Egypt from the Muslim Brotherhood to General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, or are being produced on the Gaza side but using a manufacturing system that was built during that same time frame.

“Before the change of regime,” Amidror explained, “Egypt informally but practically allowed terrorist groups to bring in all the facilities needed to produce these rockets.”

He said that the rockets are paid for by Iran.

How can Islamic Jihad manage to launch so many rockets in one day?

According to Amidror, “It is very easy to launch rockets when you are launching them at close range and you don’t really need to be accurate.”

The Jerusalem Post, 06.05.2019