A Short History Of Qassam Rockets

Written by J. Moses Browning on Tuesday January 20, 2009

A casus belli of the Israeli air assault upon and subsequent invasion of Gaza, the Qassâm rocket is Hamas’s signature weapon, a low-cost, low-tech, in-house invention that has heretofore paid big strategic dividends (even as it‘s failed miserably as a tactical device).

The Qassâm’s design is not rocket science. Wait. Sure it is. It's just not the proverbial complex technological product connoted by the slang term. It's basically an iron pipe with four stabilizing fins and a warhead at the end. The rocket is propelled by burning a mixture of fertilizer (potassium nitrate) and sugar. The warhead has a few kilos of TNT and a detonator. A perverse high-school science club could put one together.

And, in fact, that's basically what happens. As Der Spiegel documented in font color="#000000">an article last January<, teams of young men with no particular engineering skills bodge them together in garden sheds in the middle of the night out of Israeli fertilizer, Sudanese TNT smuggled through the Egyptian border tunnels, and bits and pieces from “Eastern Europe.” Total cost? According to the kid in the article, about Û500 a rocket ($735 at the time).

These model rockets from Hell are then carted out, set up and launched from wherever is convenient, a process that’s said to take about fifteen minutes. Given their relatively small size (the longest are only about six-and-a-half feet long), they’re carted in the back of cars, trucks, and other vehicles to any location convenient for launching, including the roofs of apartment buildings, soccer fields, and so forth.

You may have noticed something missing from the list of components: There’s no guidance system. Qassams are all but useless for precision fire, only for the terror of random death from the sky, like a junkyard V2.

Hamas’s use of Qassâms also exhibits a cold disregard for the lives of the Gazans on whose behalf they claim to be fighting. Given their low standards of craftsmanshipÑthe rockets are hand-built individually with varying components and ingredientsÑand the total lack of guidance systems, not to mention sophisticated fuses for arming, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn than a decent percentage (font color="#000000">this guy <estimates five percent) just drop out of the sky well short of their targets. They drop into the Gaza Strip, which, were it recognized by the UN, would be the sixth-most densely populated territory on earth, often into the same residential neighborhoods that they’re fired from to insure Israeli counterstrikes kill civilians.

The result? More dead Gazans than Israelis; something like 200+ of the former in the last year to two of the latter. Indeed, over the course of the last five years, only about fifteen Israelis total have been killed by Qassâms, which is an indictment of their low quality as a weapon, given that more than 1,700 rockets have been fired into Israel in 2008 alone.

However crude and tactically ineffective the Qassâms are, Hamas has been diligent in upgrading them in terms of range and payload, if not sophistication. The first generation of weapons was only capable of striking targets within two miles; the latest (and last) generation can go six or more.

Hamas has longer-range rockets, also home-made, like the Nasser-3 and the Quds-3, a Palestinian-modified version of the Soviet BM-51 Grad missile (commonly called the Katyusha). The Nasser-3 and the Quds 3 can fly nine miles or more and deliver significantly more explosives than the Qassâms proper. Indeed, many of the missiles discussed in the articles linked to might not actually have been Qassâms, as press reports most often refer to Palestinian rockets and missiles generically as Qassâms, just as Kalashnikov-variant rifles are colloquially called “AK-47s.”

Which leads us to tomorrow’s question. See you then.

Category: News