For some reason when people describe the projectiles launched by Palestinian forces into Israel, they refer to them as rockets. But in all other contexts it seems like such would be called missiles.
I would ask this on ELU but I have a feeling that the answer does not lie in the intrinsic semantic differences in the words (but perhaps it does), and instead for reasons of political sentiments and the like.
I get why that's confusing. The two seem to describe the same thing.
What confuses people is that the term "rocket" is really the superset (i.e. the whole group) and "missile" is a subset. Put a different way, all missiles are rockets, but not all rockets are missiles. SpaceX is a rocket company, even though their rockets have guidance and control. If you added a warhead to their Falcon 9 rocket, it would become a missile.
Where this stops being an English lesson is when we talk about the weapons used in the conflict. The terms are usually used correctly, but because of the superset problem they can sometimes be used interchangeably (i.e. incorrectly). Let's break that down here.
The vast majority of weapons out there qualify as missiles. This includes weapons like
Most of the groups that have been in conflict with Israel (most notably Hamas) have some version of the Qassam rocket. These are low-tech ballistic projectiles with a much longer range than a mere mortar. What makes these a rocket, as opposed to a missile, is they contain no guidance system. Qassam rockets are meant to be cheap and easy to build. They fly until they have expended their fuel, then crash and usually explode their simple warheads in the process.
