Billy T, could there be a way for the rockets to "hide" their initial launch point? They could shoot up, cut off the engines for a second, and then start up again, then you wouldn't be able to figure out where they were launched from. You could just angle the wings a little bit to make them shoot in a compound curve. Come to think of it, couldn't they just wait for a windy day?
These rockets. I think are quite crude. Cannot restart their "engines" as they do not have any "engines." They are, I believe like the solid state boosters of NASA's space shuttle, only much simpler. Once you "lit them up," if they do not explode, the simply burn out. Likewise I do not think they have "wings." Even if they did, there is no guidance system. They are somewhat like the ones the Chinese employed about 1000 years ago, except they do have an explosive warhead. I.e. Just a tube of solid rocket fuel set on an inclined ramp which points them generally where the terrorist hope it will go. The whole city is the target but most still miss.
I am only guessing at all this from the few video pictures I have seen of launches and adding a little physics and some read "facts."
A modern area coverage radar system would discriminate the Doppler shifted returns (from the ground clutter etc.) and should be able to "back compute" the launch point from the trajectory of the first few seconds of the rocket's climb, I am almost sure.
I am not an expert in any of this. There may be some technical difficulties I do not know. But both sides in WWII and certainly the US in the Korean War did use "counter battery fire."* In WWII, instead of radar they used acoustics and triangulations. I.e. they heard the "boom" of the gun firing at them from several (at least two) separated locations and the time delays between these received sounds defines the "equi-difference in distance curve, for those two receiving stations. Add one more receiving station and you get at least one more curve, probably two. Where these curves intersect is the point that fired at you. It is much easier, faster and more accurate now - 70years later with radar and computers but basically the same idea.
There are two well separated problems. One is to shoot the rocket down and the CIWS, even first generation can easily do that. The other problem is "where was it launched from? The integrated fire control radar system can tell that in a couple of seconds after launch. The only way to defeat it would be to use a relative sophisticated missile that "hugs the ground" behind some radar shadow like a hill and after flying some distance at low altitude from the true launch site, turns up so the radar fire control back computes to that turn up point rather than the true launch site. -far beyond the technical capabilities of the Gaza missiles. You need something like the US's tomahawk missile for that, at least a smaller version with internal gyroscopes for reference, a programmed flight path, low and good altitude control etc. If the Palestinians had anything even close to that they would be shooting down the apache helicopter as that is an easier task.
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*Why standard proceedure is to "shoot and scoot" before the counter battery fire hit where you were. Modern artillery is alway on a mobile carrier. Have you seen pictures of Israel's? They are typical.
