The measure that sets the trigger
Netanyahu's office announced on Sunday evening that Israel would intensify its strikes and move residents out of the neighbourhoods used for launches unless kites, balloons and drones stopped coming from Gaza immediately. Defence Minister Katz said he had ordered a forceful response that includes targeting the Hamas commanders held responsible, and he described the measure himself: a balloon is like a kite, and a kite is like a drone, whether or not it carries explosives. Over the same weekend Israeli media reported that the kites which came down near communities along the fence carried no explosives and posed no danger.[1]
Tying a threshold to what an object is called means giving up on measuring it. In military effect, the distance between a kite with no explosives and a drone is a measurable distance; once the rule erases it, the promised response can no longer be tied to a measurable effect either. What behaviour on the other side produces what cost becomes blurred. Writing about the fourth intercept over Romania, I argued that the tactical chain worked while the unnamed origin left the cost side of deterrence empty; the gap here is the mirror image. There it was unclear who the cost would be charged to, here what triggers it has no measure.[1], [3]
The weight of the promised response
On the day the rule was announced, rescuers said three people were killed in strikes already under way in central Gaza; among the dead in Al-Zawayda was a four-year-old child, and the Israeli military said it had hit a target in one of the strikes. So the new measure adds no capability to the field. It places a new trigger in front of force that is already in use, and lowering a threshold while capability stays fixed can raise how often that force is used without making deterrence any stronger.[2], [1]
Whether the rule is actually applied can be measured by an observable signal. If another kite or balloon comes from Gaza and the Israeli military then issues an evacuation warning that names the neighbourhood the object came from, the measure is being run as written; if the response stays limited to a strike on a single target, the displacement clause was a message. That difference should be visible by the end of September.[1]