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Iran's Proxy War Against Israel and the 2021 Gaza Conflict
(Mosaic) Brig.-Gen. (ret.) Assaf Orion - At the strategic level, Iran is building forward proxies, like Hamas and Hizbullah, on the borders of its rivals. Iran finances, arms, trains, and guides them, and then empowers them to make decisions about when to use this force. As is said in Asian philosophy, the regime "allows the situation to come about." Iran creates the potential, and then people say, "Oh, it happened by itself." Forward military proxies allow Iran to try to exhaust its rivals, to divert them and to draw their efforts and attention to the proxies rather than to Iran itself. In the May 2021 Gaza War, Iran saw that Israeli munitions penetrated the subterranean tunnel system that Hamas called the City of Jihad - a subterranean fighting city. On all its attack venues, Hamas actually failed. Its naval attacks, including submarine drones, and its aerial attacks of flying drones, failed. On tunnel attacks, Hamas lost a couple of teams that were supposed to assault Israel under our fences, but they were detected and bombed. On rocket fire, out of 4,500 rockets launched, 15-20% fell in Gaza, and 1,500 were intercepted, which is about 90% of those heading into populated areas in Israel. All in all, Israel suffered 150 impacts, with 12 civilian fatalities within Israel. The writer is a senior research fellow at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies.