What exactly are the total Israeli casualties from these rockets?
In this conflict, I think just one. But these are the only rockets that can reach Tel Aviv or any other part of Israel besides the villages just next to Gaza, and it's not like Hamas can just buy them from Home Depot.
They've spent almost ten years designing, building, testing and refining the designs of those things. They've had old Russian and Iranian rockets to examine and use, they've had their own designs to play with. They've had every opportunity to learn how to make these rockets ON THEIR OWN and every reason to continue to do so. I don't think they're "buying" them from anyone, I think they make those rockets entirely on their own.
Given the amount of time they've had to develop that capability, it's not really that far fetched. If anything, it's surprising after all this time that their rockets are as unsophisticated as they are.
In this conflict, I think just one. But these are the only rockets that can reach Tel Aviv or any other part of Israel besides the villages just next to Gaza, and it's not like Hamas can just buy them from Home Depot.
So all this talk about rockets is the concern over one dead Israeli?
That's why there are hundreds of dead Palestinian children?
No, it's about Hamas officially joining the Palestinian government and agreeing -- for once in its retched existence -- to behave like a responsible government instead of a revolutionary gang. The Israelis saw that they were actually SERIOUS about this and realized it was only a matter of time before Hamas began to be perceived as an almost-rational political party capable of being reasoned with on logical terms.
So they launched a campaign of terror and harassment designed to provoke them into an otherwise ineffectual counter-attack, which they then used to justify bombing the living shit out of them.
It's sort of like a guy seeing that his wife has gotten herself some new bipolar meds and isn't going to make an ass of herself in divorce court, so a day before the trial he breaks into her house and ransacks all the furniture, hoping she'll get pissed off and take a swing at him; then, when she inevitably DOES, proceeds to curb-stomp her in front of the entire neighborhood while shouting "See? She's crazy! I just want a little peace and quiet, GAWD!"
