The day Israel's wars changed forever

• Published date: 17 January 2021
• Author: HERB KEINON
• Date: 17 January 2021

"Tonight, Washington time, there has been an unprovoked attack by Iraq, launching Scud missiles, or perhaps improved Scud missiles, against purely civilian targets," he said.

Just hours after the US launched Operation Desert Storm to pry Saddam Hussein's Iraq out of the Kuwait he invaded five months earlier, Saddam – true to his threats – responded to the US military attack by launching missiles at Israel.

In other words, US president George H.W. Bush attacked Iraq to free Kuwait on January 16, and Iraq's response was to fire eight Scud missiles the following night at Haifa and Tel Aviv.

No one was directly killed by those eight missiles. In the ensuing five weeks – which saw another 31 missiles fired at the Israeli home front as the nation sat huddled in "safe rooms" with gas masks on and windows sealed with masking tape – two Israelis were killed directly by the missiles.

The number of indirect deaths attributed to the attacks – from heart attacks to the incorrect use of gas masks and atropine distributed to the nation in case the missiles were laced with some kind of chemical or biological agents – ranged from 11, according to some sources, to as many as 74 according to others.

This marked the first time since 1948 that Israeli cities came under direct enemy attack. Not only did the attacks traumatize the nation and make all its citizens, no matter how far from the front, feel vulnerable, it changed forever wars involving Israel in the Middle East.

Israel by that time was unfortunately no stranger to war. Up until then it had fought five full-blown wars, plus a war of attrition. The lion's share of the battles of those wars took place at the front near the borders, away from the civilian population centers. Those wars were marked by tank battles in the Sinai or the Golan Heights, or dog fights in Egyptian or Syrian airspace.

But this war was different, because this was not our tanks against theirs on some desert plain; rather, it was their missiles against our population centers, their rockets against our kindergartens. And every war or low-level conflict Israel has been engaged in since then has followed the same pattern: the enemy's rockets, missiles or bombs against Israel's civilians.

That type of warfare characterized the Second Intifada launched in September 2000 – suicide bombers against buses, cafes and supermarkets, leading to 1,053 Israelis killed in four years.

This type of warfare also characterized the Second Lebanon War in 2006: Hezbollah...