Almost immediately following Prime Minister Netanyahu’s press conference where he laid out his plan to assert Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley, Hamas launched a rocket into Ashdod, where Netanyahu was speaking on Tuesday.

Admitting that it was a targeted attack, the Prime Minister stated: “if Hamas is shooting at us in the middle of a Likud event, then it seems as though they don’t want us here”.

As soon as the rocket was launched at Ashdod, Netanyahu was briefly whisked off of the stage only to return once the red alert siren ended shortly after 9:00 pm. The IDF reported that two rockets were fired at Israel which forced the red alert siren to go off in Israel’s southern Gaza Belt communities. Both rockets were intercepted by the iron dome missile defense system.

The rocket attack came almost immediately after the Prime Minister made a major announcement regarding the full annexation of the Jordan Valley.

“One place that can have sovereignty immediately applied to it after the elections is the Jordan Valley. The next government will apply Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan Valley,” Netanyahu said on Tuesday at a news conference in Ramat Gan.

In response to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement, Shlomo Ne’eman, head of the Gush Etzion Regional Council said: “Applying sovereignty to Judea and Samaria in general and specifically to Gush Etzion is a dream come true! These are the dreams of the heroic founders who settled the land and who sacrificed their lives in the War of Independence, and our dream, sitting here on this beautiful mountain as part of our national mission.”

“The Jordan Valley is a good start and we relate to this as the beginning of the road. It’s been 52 years with a military government in Judea and Samaria and today begins the end of a chapter and the starting of a new process, one that is correct and just, which will change the reality for the better” Ne’eman added.