Fertilizer, frustration fuel Gaza's rockets

A visit to a rocketmaker shows a reliance on very basic materials. The range of rockets fired at Israel has slowly been growing.

from the January 15, 2008 edition

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Aside from the TNT, he uses the basic equipment that generations of model rocket hobbyists in the US have relied on. The metal bodies are fashioned from piping.

The rocketmaker says he makes a couple of small rockets a month with a range of 5 kilometers costing about $300 each. Other workshops affiliated with groups like Islamic Jihad produce far more, he says.

The rockets are a classical weapon of terror, since they can't be aimed with any accuracy and are as likely to fall on a school or a hospital as they are on a military target. Human Rights Watch has condemned the rocket fire for that reason; it has killed few Israelis but has traumatized communities near the border, particularly the town of Sderot, which has been hit dozens of times in recent years.

The rocketmaker says it doesn't bother him that his products might be killing civilians. "Hundreds of us die – children, too – and just a few of them die. I feel like I have no choice – it's either this or surrender."

At the moment, his biggest worry is liquid glucose, which he mixes with the saltpeter to produce the fuel that powers his rockets. An Israeli blockade on most shipping into Gaza has cut the availability of glucose – also used to sweeten cakes, candy, and soda – so he's making his own mixture with granulated sugar.

He also makes a far more extravagant claim: He says the rocket that landed in Ashkelon was his own production, and that he made it at a cost of $900 for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a communist group that claimed responsibility for that attack. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad also separately claimed the attack as its own.

"I laughed when they said it was from Iran. I've figured out a new fuel mixture. The rocket was three meters long (10 feet) and had 11 kilograms (22 pounds) of TNT in the tip,'' he says. "My techniques are more advanced than everyone else's now."

It was impossible to verify his claim, and it's more than possible that his comments were simply bravado. But it also seems reasonable to believe that the rocketmakers are slowly increasing their products' range as they build bigger rockets that can carry more fuel in their engines.

The first rockets produced in Gaza, usually called Qassams, after the military wing of Hamas, had a range of five kilometers. By 2002, Qassam-2 rockets were being produced that had a range of about nine kilometers. In 2005, Qassam-3s were developed with a range of 10 kilometers.

The Israeli military said the rocket that landed in Ashkelon was a Grad-type Katyusha rocket, originally a Russian design that is in the arsenals of many Eastern European countries and Iran.

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