On Tuesday, I had been to Sderot. This is a small city of about 18000 inhabitants which is situated directly next to the Gaza Stripe, the Hamas controlled part of the Palestinian territories. Since several years, Sderot suffers under continuous attacks by Kassam rockets. In 2008, more than 1000(!!) rockets where fired by extremists from Gaza.
8 out 10 rockets are detected by Israeli surveillance devices(see the white thing on the pics) and cause an 15sec. alarm before they hit the ground. Dont talk about the other 20%…
Being there, in a time of a “cease fire”(which actually just means that hamas is doing less attacks and restocking their arsenals), was impressive because I could see how people live under such conditions. The whole infrastructure in these cities is built to fit to the 15 seconds period of time! They couldnt built a playground for their kids before they werent able to secure it. There are shelters everywhere and nobody is just going for a walk outside. They also showed us videos of an attack and how people reacted. Counting backwards from 15 to 0, you could see people hiding, with fear on their faces, kids disrupting their playing. And this usually happens every single day!
On the picture above, you can see one of the rockets they showed us. It is amazing that people stay there, ready to be attacked each minute. In my opinion, they are extremely important for the surveival of Israel as a country, and they dont surrender because they know that Hamas would take this as a huge victory and will go on attacking other cities.
Like you also see on the pics, we could just take a glance into Gaza. It is a scary feeling to stand between the 2 walls in this area(one against entering the city, one against snipers) and having a look at people who would risk their lives to kill you. Additionally it was good to hear peoples opinions about it and to see how these places are secured. But still, only a small strip of Gaza is encircled by a wall, only about 2,5 kilometers.
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December 27, 2008 at 9:06 am
[...] groups, which does not recognize the existence of Israel, are shooting missiles at Israeli cities (I wrote about that) near the Gaza strip. Thanks to strict isolation of the Gaza strip and the “wall” [...]