Deterrence?

Seventy rockets and numerous mortars were fired from Gaza into Israel today. This represents a minor escalation by Hamas and the other terrorist groups over their 8-a day average. Although no-one was killed there were some narrow escapes, a girl's bed was hit, but she was not in it at the time. The main concern now is that Hamas has rockets capable of hitting Ahskelon and Ashdod, two major Israeli cities, as well as Sderot, and for the first time there was a rocket drill in Ashdod.
Tomorrow, Thursday, FM Tzipi Livni is invited to meet with Pres. Mubarak of Egypt in Sharm-al-Sheikh. Apparently he wants to tell her that while he is angry at Hamas for not agreeing to a continuation of the temporary ceasefire (tardiyah or calm) that ended a few days ago, and he is angry at them for jeopardizing a unity Govt. with Pres. Abbas of Fatah, he does not want Israel to mount a major campaign into Gaza. Who cares what he wants now. He has tried to get Hamas to continue the ceasefire, but frankly because Israel has been so weak in its responses to Hamas attacks, they are empowered to continue them and they expect no major Israeli response, their propaganda is that Israel is currently weak, with a caretaker Govt. of Olmert, who anyway is a wimp, and Defense Minister Barak, who is an equivocator who believes in restraint, so that they can get away with these escalations without fear.
Thursday the Cabinet met and gave the IDF approval to take counter actions to the barrage of rockets. Actually the IDF already has the authority to respond to attacks, but the problem is that they don't want to attack while Livni is meeting with Mubarak, because that looks like thumbing their noses at him, and they won't want to attack just after the meeting because that looks like he gave Israel the go-ahead. So there is always an excuse not to act.
Since Iran is the power behind Hamas in Gaza, and has trained all their gunmen, the Iranian al Quds force has probably given the orders for this escalation to take attention away from the Iranian nuclear program and to exploit the weakness of the Israel Govt. If the IDF does not respond in a strong way they will lose all credibility and it will merely invite more attacks, greater escalation and longer range rockets being fired at Israeli cities further away, such as Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion airport. We have reached a watershed, either the IDF counter-attacks now or our defense deterrence will be lost forever.