What I know about the air force is mainly about airstrikes in the Gaza Strip. At that time, when I was in service, it very much depended on the amounts of high-trajectory fire. In a week of heavy high-trajectory fire, there were also lots of airstrikes. A chicken and egg kind of thing.

Were there trends or was it per incident? The number of airstrikes and incidents of high-trajectory fire rose over the year and a half that I was there.

Were they correlated? Yes.

More firing or more airstrikes, what came first? Usually, an airstrike was a response to firing. Sometimes there was also intelligence information and then the airstrike is what starts that mini-round of escalation. If we chose to strike someone more serious, it turned into a full-blown round of escalation, not mini. At the presentation summarizing the first six months of IDF activity or operational activity in 2011, the first slide shows major events that took place during that period, divided according to regional commands. In those six months, there were two serious rounds of escalation, one in March and the other in April. One of the rounds began following rocket fire at Ashdod or Ashqelon, where one person was wounded or something like that, otherwise it wouldn’t have started. The other round began because of a mortar shell that accidentally hit a home and killed four civilians, including a five-year-old girl in the Gaza Strip.

Who fired it? It was a mortar shell that we fired. Mortar shelling in an attempt to hit a terrorist or someone about whom we had intelligence information. The sights weren’t calibrated or something, and it hit a home and killed 3 or 4 civilians, including a five-year-old girl. In the summary they prepared in the end, I saw that the reason for the first round was listed, but not for the second round. “Why? What? You took it off?”. “Unknown.” Some of the senior ranks attach a lot of importance to those presentations. They’re shown to the Chief of Staff’s Forum, to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, people look at them and see two rounds of escalation and say, “Two rounds, we have to really pound them.” But one of those rounds started under totally different circumstances.