Katyusha from Lebanon strikes northern Israel

A Katyusha rocket fired from Lebanon hit Israel last night. This was the second such incident in the last month and a half, the fourth since the start of the year and the sixth since the end of the Second Lebanon War in August 2006.

The rocket landed in an open area near Kiryat Shmona and caused no casualties or property damage. It was apparently fired by a Palestinian organization loosely affiliated with the global jihad movement.

The relatively small (107-millimeter) rocket ignited a small fire that was quickly extinguished. According to the Israel Defense Forces, it was fired from the village of Hula in south Lebanon. The army responded with artillery fire, as it usually does in such cases.

In a statement, the IDF blamed the Lebanese government for not preventing the attack.

Though the IDF detected the missile before it landed, no sirens went off in the Galilee. This was due to a decision made jointly by GOC Northern Command Gadi Eizenkot and mayors of northern towns: to refrain from connecting the siren system to the detection system. The reasoning behind this decision was that the chances of an attack on the north were small, and therefore, there was no reason to disrupt residents' lives with the inevitable false alarms.

As far as is known, all six of the rockets launched in the last three years were fired by radical Palestinian Sunni groups such as Usbat al-Ansar and Fatah al-Islam, and not by Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi'ite group that largely controls south Lebanon.

Nevertheless, the increase in the number of rockets fired this year as compared to previous years could indicate one of two potentially worrying developments: that Hezbollah has started giving tacit consent to the Palestinian groups' activity, or that the already limited control over south Lebanon exercised by the Lebanese Army and UNIFIL, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, is weakening.