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Rocket Fire Marks Anniversary of 2012 Gaza War

The Israeli Air Forces responds to Palestinian mortars by attacking rocket launchers

by
Adam Chandler
November 14, 2013
An Iron Dome Battery in 2012(IDF)
An Iron Dome Battery in 2012(IDF)

If you think Americans are obsessed with anniversaries, well, you’re probably right. But also surprisingly anniversary-obsessed are terrorist organizations. For more, consider Benghazi. Or reports today that on the one-year anniversary of Operation Pillar of Defense–otherwise known as last year’s semi-annual war between Hamas and Israel–mortars were fired from northern Gaza into Israel.

There were no casualties in the attacks, which coincided with the first anniversary of a cross border conflict between Israel and Hamas, the Islamist group that rules the Palestinian enclave.



The militant group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for firing the mortars, which landed harmlessly in open areas in southern Israel.

Following the war, the frontier between Israel and Gaza has been relatively quiet, this is, if you consider relative quiet on your border to be only a handful of rocket attacks in the course of a year. Keeping up with the symbolism of the occasion, the Israeli Air Force quickly responded to the attack, destroying two hidden rocket launchers.

“Launching rockets against Israel and its civilians is a breach of our sovereignty. We maintain the right to operate against those who are involved in terror,” Lt. Col. Peter Lerner of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said in a statement.

The spokesman went onto explain that Hamas, which rules Gaza, would be responsible for all attacks originating from Gaza.

Adam Chandler was previously a staff writer at Tablet. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, Slate, Esquire, New York, and elsewhere. He tweets @allmychandler.