On Thursday, March 13, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened a special meeting of the diplomatic-security cabinet at the headquarters of the Defense ministry — the nerve center of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and its intelligence services in Tel Aviv.
Such cabinet meetings in Israel often take place under a pall of secrecy and usually go unreported. This time, however, an official statement about the meeting was released. The purpose was to ratchet up pressure on Gaza-based Islamic Jihad leaders, who, just a day earlier, had fired a salvo of dozens of rockets at Israeli towns near the Gaza Strip and in the Negev region, thus embarking on another round of violence against the IDF and the Israeli Air Force (IAF).