Tensions escalate after Gazan rocket barrage
Southern Israel is reeling, after Gaza militants fired 200 rockets in a single day, injuring residents and terrifying worshippers in a synagogue.
SOUTHERN Israel is reeling, after Gaza militants fired 200 rockets in a single day, injuring residents and terrifying worshippers in a synagogue.
Days later, when The AJN went to press, residents were still recovering from the booms and the shock. They were also complaining that despite a shaky ceasefire, burning kites and balloons are still being dispatched by Gazans, while rocket firing attempts are continuing and a bird has even had flammable material set alight attached to it.
One of the helium-filled flaming balloons landed on Tuesday in the yard of a nursery school in the Sdot Negev region, as children played outside. Their quick-thinking teacher immediately moved the kids inside.
During the rocket barrage last weekend, in one Sderot community, people were praying when a rocket landed nearby, sending shrapnel in to the synagogue. “It was a scene of great stress and alarm,” said Dov Drachdman, a Sderot youth worker.
For Drachdman, seeing the chaos at the synagogue was a sad continuation of a miserable day. “I had been awake all night because of the sirens and the rockets,” he said.
Throughout the city, and the wider region, families spent Shabbat running to shelters. Today, some owe their lives to these shelters.
The shrapnel at the synagogue came from a strike on a residential building. It hit a shelter, where the thick concrete walls didn’t allow it to penetrate and reach the residents inside. Locals said that if this shelter hadn’t been built in 2010, things could have ended very differently.
In one home, Aharon Bucharis and his wife and two daughters didn’t hear a siren and didn’t make it to the shelter. They were left with injuries, ranging from light to moderate, after glass from the windows thundered toward them as a result of the rocket.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told The AJN that the four rockets altogether hit Sderot, the most densely-populated area by the border, and that this is a watershed in Gaza violence. “Before this there hasn’t been a rocket landing inside Sderot for months,” he said.
The Israeli military pounded Hamas targets in Gaza, in response to the attacks, including a high-rise building in the Al-Shati refugee camp, a Hamas Battalion headquarters in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, and the former Palestinian National Library. Now, instead of being used for books, the building is a training facility for urban warfare. According to Israel the strikes constituted the biggest anti-Hamas operation since Operation Protective Edge in 2014.
During the course of Saturday, Israeli reservists were called up, and some commentators were predicting a major escalation. Eventually, an unofficial ceasefire was reached, but it hasn’t stopped the aerial terrorism of flaming kites and balloons, which have so far burnt 2471 acres of nature reserve and national park land. They continue to fall and the IDF has been striking posts where militants are launching kites and balloons.
This week a new means of aerial arson was discovered — a bird. The Israel Parks and Nature Authority has announced that on Monday it found a common kestrel, its legs were tied to a wire with flammable material at the other end, hanging in a tree.
The INPA announced that “the kestrel wore a harness that was linked to a steel wire, at the other end of which was flammable material,” adding: “This exceptional event marks the first time that an animal has been used to ignite fires.”
Alon Shuster, mayor of the Sha’ar Hanegev region, remarked: “People who can be cruel to human beings clearly can also be cruel to animals.” He said that in his region there are lots of people who “are very tense and very frustrated, and who don’t know how situation will end.”
As well as feeling shock and fear, some residents of southern Israel say that they feel forgotten — by the world.
Drachdman commented: “People feel that the world doesn’t care about us, that it doesn’t care that people are trying to kill Israelis”.
“People are frustrated that the balloons and kites aren’t being reported and that the rocket attacks here don’t get coverage.”
Israel has been toughening its stance towards Hamas in Gaza over recent days. On Monday, the government decided that it is closing the Kerem Shalom crossing from Israel to Gaza again, following another closure last week. The closure cuts off fuel, gas and commercial goods, but not humanitarian supplies.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to Sderot on Monday to meet local leaders, and declared: “It is important that Hamas understand that it faces an iron wall and this wall is comprised, first of all, of a determined government, of strong local leadership and Zionist settlement.”
He told the leaders that he is “convinced of our common strength to rebuff, deter and, in the end, defeat this Gaza-based terror.”
NATHAN JEFFAY
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