A partial mirror of the post from Gates of Vienna. For the whole article please click through.
Our Israeli correspondent MC sent us this message from Sderot:
It looks bad here. Reserves are being called up and roads have been closed in the area.
The missile to the Sharon last night was a huge escalation. It was homemade and had a large warhead — with a GRAD type range. It looks as if Hamas has reverse engineered something with a range up to 100km.
Local events are being cancelled, and Hamas is talking up a provocation, but at the same time claiming that the missile was a ‘mistake’. That will be the second of such mistakes in the last few weeks — a missile was intercepted just South of Tel Aviv about a month ago.
There are even claims that the ‘mistake’ was caused by the weather:
Hamas: Rocket Launch May Have Been Caused by ‘Bad Weather’
A Hamas official denied Israel’s accusation that it was behind Monday’s rocket strike on a town in central Israel, north of Tel Aviv, Monday morning which wounded seven Israelis and led Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to vow a strong response.
“No one from the resistance movements, including Hamas, has an interest in firing rockets from the Gaza Strip towards the enemy,” the official told AFP on condition of anonymity, evoking the possibility that it may have been caused by “bad weather”…
The fake ‘mistake’ means that Hamas can claim that Israel is the aggressor and that any response is ‘disproportionate.
