ISRAEL’S armed forces (IDF) alleged yesterday that its decision to bomb 20 targets in the open-air prison that is Gaza was because a rocket launched from the territory had hit a house in Beersheba.

A similar projectile fell into the sea.

The Beersheba rocket was originally said to have caused damage but no injury and then to have inflicted four injuries, later explained as a mother and her three children experiencing shock from inside their bomb shelter as the missile struck.

Palestinians without bomb shelters will readily sympathise with the four civilians, having known little but shock — exacerbated by personal loss, post-traumatic stress disorder and grieving for butchered loved ones — at the hands of the Israeli military occupation.

They will have been expecting an upsurge in bombing by the IDF in the run-up to Israel’s local elections that are to take place in a fortnight.

Most Israeli political formations have a habit of heightening tension before elections, issuing blood-curdling warnings to the electorate and promising that their party alone can be relied on to stand up to Palestinian resistance group Hamas.

It matters not that both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the major armed groups in Gaza, issued a joint statement condemning the rocket fire as “irresponsible” in light of ongoing efforts by an Egyptian military intelligence delegation in Gaza to establish a negotiating framework between Israel and Hamas to loosen the occupiers’ noose of economic sanctions around Gazans’ necks.

IDF spokesperson Lt Col Jonathan Conricus said: “There are only two organisations in Gaza that have this calibre of rocket — Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It’s not hard to narrow down who’s behind it.” So that was that.

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad responded to the IDF bombings by affirming their “preparedness to confront the occupation’s assaults. Our guns will continue to be a protective shield for our people and our weapons are drawn at the face of our enemy.”

Whoever launched the two rockets from Gaza did not do so in a vacuum.

Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman warned on Tuesday — that is, before the rockets were fired — that the IDF was gearing up for a major strike on Gaza to, as he explained it, put a stop to violence.

He justified this, in a visit to the IDF Gaza Division close to the border with the Palestinian enclave, saying that a “strong” military blow against Hamas was “the only way to lower the level of violence to zero or close to zero.”

This would be his advice to a security cabinet meeting set for yesterday, he said, “even at a price of moving to a wide-scale confrontation.”

Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is both Lieberman’s ally and his competitor in threatening “tough” responses to the Palestinians, declared on Sunday that Israel will launch a "different" kind of response unless Palestinians drop their protests close to the border fence.

"Hamas apparently didn't get the message," Netanyahu said during Sunday's weekly cabinet meeting, possibly in reference to the shooting dead of seven unarmed Palestinians last Friday by IDF snipers when 15,000 protesters gathered at the fence.

“If they don't stop the attacks against us, they will be stopped in a different way and it will be painful — very painful.

“We are very close to a different kind of activity, an activity that will include very powerful blows. If it has sense, Hamas will stop firing and stop these violent disturbances now.”

Tel Aviv likes to dramatise the border protests — in which at least 155 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier have been killed — together with largely ineffective improvised rockets and incendiary balloons and kites, as somehow an existential threat to Israel.

The incendiaries flown over the border into Israel have caused some damage to crops, but a pinprick compared with the actions of illegal armed settlers in Jews-only colonies who launch forays to chop down olive groves and other agricultural areas of the West Bank to make life intolerable for local residents.

Such attacks are often carried out under the noses of IDF forces who intervene only if Palestinian farmers defend themselves against the aggressors.

Occupation troops who respond so swiftly to real or supposed violence by Palestinians are apparently unwilling or incapable of preventing attacks such as last Friday’s murder of Aisha Mohammed al-Rabi when the car she was riding in was stoned by settlers as it approached an Israeli checkpoint near Nablus.

The Israeli government’s ramped-up rhetoric and violence will have aroused fear and apprehension in the hearts of the 180 residents of the West Bank Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar, around which occupation armoured bulldozers have taken up position this week.

They have levelled ground in the village, which is close to Jerusalem and situated between the major illegal Israeli settlements of Maale Adumim and Kfar Adumim, prior to its demolition, which has been authorised by Israel’s legal authorities on the grounds that it was built without the occupiers’ permission.

The United Nations has established that, between 2010 and 2014, the military occupation approved just 1.5 per cent of all building permit requests by Palestinians.

The villagers were originally expelled from their lands in the Naqab desert by the Israeli military in the 1950s and were internally displaced twice more before settling in Khan al-Ahmar long before illegal settlements around it started.

Apart from non-permission, the Israeli court cited possible dangers to villagers of a nearby road, but the occupiers’ alleged concern for their health and well-being doesn’t stretch to appreciating the dangers associated with relocating Khan al-Ahmar residents to a dumping ground near Abu Dis, adjacent to a landfill site.

Nor does it extend to ordering the occupation forces to prevent local settlers from flooding the village by spraying it with sewage and other waste water, most recently on Monday.

Following the doctrine of a good day to bury bad news, heightened tension and a possible spike in military activity in Gaza might present Israel with a handy opportunity to sweep away Khan al-Ahmar and then, within a short time frame, authorise more settlements to link up Maale Adumim and Kfar Adumim to complete an unbreakable ring around east Jerusalem, thereby, the plan goes, destroying the Palestinians’ hope of making this part of the city the capital of their future state.

In short, eradicating Khan al-Ahmar is part of zionism’s scheme of ethnically cleansing Palestinian land, annexing what it requires and condemning the Palestinians to “self-government” in, at best, an archipelago of towns and villages under Israeli authority similar to the bantustans of apartheid South Africa.

Expansion of Israel’s colonial conquests on the West Bank rarely make the headlines now, but the Netanyahu cabinet agreed at the weekend to establish a new Jews-only settlement in Hebron, building 31 homes, two kindergartens, a daycare centre and a public park in what the occupiers call the Hezekiah quarter of the city.

Israel’s Peace Now group, which has appealed, together with Hebron’s Palestinian municipality, to the occupation’s Civil Administration — effectively Major General Kamil Abu Rokon — asking him to oppose the project, points out that the site once housed the Hebron central bus station before it was confiscated by the IDF in 1981 to build a military base.

This follows an increasingly normal Israeli dispossession process where Palestinians are displaced on security grounds, allowing more settlements to be set up and further military bases to protect them.

Israeli NGO Yesh Din published a paper recently, ‘Through the Lens of Israel’s Interests: The Civil Administration in the West Bank,’ pointing out that, while international law requires the military commander of an occupied territory to protect the interests of the occupied population, the Civil Administration is effectively used as a means of oppression and domination over Palestinians in the West Bank.

Palestinians know that already, as does the Israeli government, but, until Tel Aviv’s collaborators in the European Union and North America accept that international law should apply to Israel, ethnic cleansing, colonisation and punishment bombings will remain the order of the day.