As Iran and Israel collide, will Palestinians pay the price?

Anti-missile system fires interception missiles as drones and missiles are fired from Iran, as seen over Tel Aviv, 14 April 2024

Ghousoon Bisharat writes in +972 on 15 April 2024:

Two days on, the world is still trying to make sense of Iran’s dramatic attack on Israel. In concert with its regional partners, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) unleashed more than 300 drones and missiles on the night of April 13, marking the first time Israel or Iran had targeted the other state on its own soil.

While unprecedented in character, Iran’s attack was by no means unexpected, coming in the wake of Israel’s airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus two weeks earlier, which had killed seven IRGC officers and two civilians. The vast majority of the projectiles, some of which took several hours to arrive, were intercepted by Israel, aided by the armies of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Jordan, and intelligence provided by several Gulf states. Only a handful of the missiles managed to evade Israel’s defenses, including one that seriously wounded a 7-year-old Bedouin girl in an unrecognized village in the Naqab/Negev, and another that caused minor damage to the Nevatim air base.

To grasp the bigger picture around these events, +972 spoke with Khaled Elgindy, the director of the Israel-Palestine program at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, and author of “Blind Spot: American and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump.”   While explaining the “message” Iran sought to send with its anticipated attack, Elgindy also shared his doubts on whether Israel would heed U.S. pressures to avoid a severe retaliation, and further noted how Arab regimes might try to “spin” their own involvement to try and save face with their angered publics. But he also emphasized that the Palestinians remain at the heart of this conflagration — and are still paying the heaviest price for it.

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