The surprise assault by Hamas against Israel was a meticulously planned offensive that the Palestinian militant group is capable of keeping up, with a risk of even greater escalation, analysts say.
Hamas can count on a deep arsenal of rockets to use against Israel but key questions include how much support it has received from Iran, which has expressed its backing for the offensive, and whether Hezbollah will enter the fray.
Iran on Monday rejected as unfounded allegations it had a role in the massive assault on Israel by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.
"The accusations linked to an Iranian role... are based on political reasons," foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani told reporters, adding that Palestinians had "the necessary capacity and will to defend their nation and recover their rights" without any help from Tehran.
More than 700 Israelis have been killed in the country's worst losses since the 1973 Yom Kippur war -- when it was also caught flat-footed by a combined Egyptian and Syrian attack -- and over 400 Palestinians slain as Israel presses a relentless bombardment of Hamas' Gaza stronghold.
"It was a huge failure on the Israeli side and a huge achievement for Hamas," said Kobi Michael, senior researcher at the Tel-Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).
"In order to launch such an operation, you have to do a lot of preparation, planning, coordination and you have to have a very meaningful, significant, essential strategic prospect or objective that you are seeking to achieve," he added, emphasising that Hamas "knows the price of such an operation will be very high."
- 'Substantial arsenal' -
In May 2021, Hamas had already surprised Israel by sending thousands of rockets -- sometimes a hundred within a few minutes -- aimed at saturating its Iron Dome anti-missile defence system.
Then, Hamas used 4,360 rockets in the space of 15 days while this time around 3,000 fell on Israel in two days, according to Elliot Chapman, analyst for the British security intelligence group Janes.
"It is unclear if the militants will be able to sustain this volume of fire over the next few days. If so this would be the largest rocket attack on Israel so far," he told AFP.
Fabian Hinz, a research fellow at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, said that Hamas should still have a "substantial arsenal of rockets" kept in reserve and it "seems likely they will be able to keep up the rocket fire for quite a while."
Hamas has an arsenal that is difficult to quantify numerically but certainly ample.
Its arms come from an array of different sources, including Iran but also Syria, Libya after the fall of Moammar Gadhafi and other Middle Eastern countries -- not to mention weapons stolen or captured from Israel itself, said a Western expert on armaments who posts anonymously on X (formerly Twitter) under the handle Calibre Obscura.
https://www.naharnet.com/stories/en/300848-hamas-attack-is-iran-involved-and-will-hezbollah-enter-the-fray