Let’s look at how the battlefield is shaping up over in the Middle East. Here is Israel alongside the Mediterranean. It’s about the size of New Jersey. 7.5 million people, 75% Jewish. The economy is good, unemployment below 7%. Gaza by comparison geographically very small, only about twice as big as Washington D.C., predominately Palestinian. The economy there is quite bad and unemployment is very high. 

 

Globalfirepower.com has called Israel the tenth most powerful military in the world, so let’s break that down and see why. They have compulsory military service, that means every young person must go into the military for a while. 176,000 active troops are available and they have about half a million that they can call up from the reserves very quickly. Ground forces, also impressive. Some 3,000 tanks. If you count at the artillery pieces and mortars, things like that, you get up to about 12,000 units that can operate on the ground. And of course, their air force is formidable. About 800 aircraft out there, including some 200 helicopters. This is largely what they’ve used to have these strikes within Gaza. 

 

Now, if you look at Hamas, their forces are much smaller in terms of their official forces, certainly, if you look at people who are really in uniform, soldiers, police, whatever you want to call it, about 12,500 and of course they have nothing like the weapons that the Israelis have. However, Palestinian militants do have lots and lots of rockets, and I want to bring in a model of one of them here. This a Kassam 2, you probably heard this a good bit. These rockets are popular because they are cheap, they’re easy to make out of steel tubes. They only weigh 70 to 100 pounds, and they are fueled essentially by commercial-grade fertilizer, and they can pack quite a punch. They’re not very accurate, but if you fire enough of them, they don’t have to be accurate. If you go beyond this to some of their more robust and better targeted rockets and missiles, then you also start talking about range. In this conflict so far, we have reports of weapons fired from Gaza traveling as much as 50 miles to hit Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. In fact, Israeli officials now believe as much as a fifth of population of Israel is subject to these rocket attacks. That’s something they say they simply will not tolerate anymore, and that’s why we keep hearing all this talk and speculation about a possible ground invasion of Gaza.