In Iran, Hope and Change mean bigger rockets.  Now that the Israelis and Hamas have mostly stopped fighting each other, the Iranians will surprise no one by attempting to rearm Hamas with better weapons.  Hamas refuses to acknowledge this as “smuggling”, but whatever it’s called, Israel intends to stop it before Hamas can hit Tel Aviv:

Iran has renewed efforts to supply advanced weaponry to Hamas and the IDF is concerned that the terror group will try to smuggle long-range Fajr missiles into the Gaza Strip.

According to the latest intelligence assessments, Iran, which was responsible for writing Hamas’s military doctrine, has already launched an internal probe to determine how the plan it had created for Hamas failed to cause more IDF casualties.

The Iranians wanted three results out of the Hamas fight, none of which they achieved, in order to cast the battle as a victory for the Islamist terrorists.  Hamas was supposed to have trapped the IDF infantry in street-to-street fighting with booby traps and tunnels, killing as many Israeli soldiers as possible.  Increased rocket attacks were to show that any IDF action was pointless.  Lastly, Hamas was supposed to capture an IDF soldier for ransom or at least provide a burned-out tank to exploit on Western media.

Instead, Hamas failed to achieve even one of those objectives.  They miscalculated the reaction from Israel, and as a result, their defensive efforts got overwhelmed in the invasion.  The massive force kept IDF casualties low while Hamas lost hundreds of terrorists.  They failed, at least as is known, to capture a single Israeli soldier for propaganda purposes.  They couldn’t stop Israeli tanks, and the Iranian Unit of Tehran-trained commandos got destroyed by the IDF in Gaza City.  Even the rocket attacks dwindled during the offensive.

The Iranians now want to get the Fajr into Gaza, but that won’t be easy.  The current missiles Hamas launches only have a length of two meters, but the Fajr is closer to ten meters.  That will make it more difficult to smuggle, and also to reassemble without notice in Gaza.  If Hamas succeeds, though, they can easily hit Tel Aviv.

Let’s hope the Iranians have as much success with that as they did with the Iranian Unit in Gaza this month.