It’s like a movie on repeat.
Another day, another round of incendiary balloons and rockets launched from the Gaza Strip, followed by Israeli airstrikes.
Except it’s the reality for thousands of Israelis living around the coastal enclave.
On Sunday, a rocket was launched from the Hamas-run Gaza Strip hours after an incendiary device was found in a community bordering the area.
The IDF responded with airstrikes that targeted four Hamas military compounds and a terrorist tunnel.
Following the airstrikes, more rockets were fired at southern Israel.
Two of the missiles were intercepted by the Iron Dome air-defense system. Several Israelis were injured while running for shelter.
Four missile attacks have been launched from Gaza in less than a week. The IDF responded like it always does, targeting Hamas military infrastructure.
Just like the rocket attacks since May’s Operation Guardian of the Walls, no Palestinian group took responsibility for the rocket fire.
With the two last fugitives from the Gilboa Prison escape belonging to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, it is more than likely PIJ is the culprit.
But Hamas is the group that rules the Gaza Strip – and Hamas is the one that pays.
There’s a problem with Israel’s strategy, however.
Although the military and defense establishment has promised, and continues to rhetorically repeat, “What was, no longer is,” what is happening seems more like, “What was, continues to be.”
The IDF says the number of targets and intensity of the strikes have increased since the May conflict. But for all of its talk, Israelis in the South continue to run to their bomb shelters.
And this week, it’s been on an almost nightly basis.
A senior IDF officer recently said there are only two options for victory regarding Gaza, and neither is likely to occur: overthrowing Hamas and reoccupying the Gaza Strip, or overthrowing Hamas and turning the enclave into Dubai 2.0.
The best interim option for Gaza, senior brass have decided, is to live with the waves of violent rounds of conflict, such as Operation Guardian of the Walls.
The IDF said it struck dozens of Hamas targets during the May operation, including weapons manufacturing plants and multi-barrel rocket launchers, but it was not able to destroy the group’s rocket arsenal.
While it viewed the operation as a success that restored its deterrence in the South, the military has admitted only part of Hamas’s rocket stockpile was hit due to a lack of precise intelligence, giving Israel’s mortal enemy ample opportunity to fire thousands of missiles in the future.
Or they can be fired one by one, day by day.
On Sunday, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said the two options outlined by the senior officer “are two bad options. That’s not a reality we can accept.”
Speaking at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism Conference at Reichman University (IDC Herzliya), he said Israel should instead advance the “economy for security” formulation without negotiating with Hamas.
Lapid’s two-step plan, which he said “would create stability on both sides of the border,” is full of concepts that are by no means new and is not an official government policy.
But “we can’t accept this reality,” Lapid said. “The State of Israel has a duty to tell its citizens we have turned every stone in an attempt to deal with the Gazan issue.”
Though Israel’s military has understood that the issue of Gaza cannot be ignored, it’s as if it has given up winning the fight and has resorted to carrying out retaliatory strikes instead of being on the offensive.
And it is Israel’s southern communities that suffer the most from this decision.
Why should they live with almost daily rocket fire at a time when the country is not at war?
Why should parents have to rush their children to bomb shelters or have them sleep in them so that they don’t need to wake them up?
Lapid understands the IDF has apparently given up on winning – for now.
There needs to be another way, or else residents of the South will continue to be held hostage in a situation that can deteriorate into another war at any moment.