Living with Rockets: An appalling reality

I was actually starting to believe that I was the lucky charm of Sderot. Over the past eight months I have been to Sderot on business nearly every other week, and each time that I traveled down from Jerusalem, things were quiet. No Kassam rockets, no "red color" warnings, no Israelis fleeing for their lives. While in town I had made a point to set aside time to visit the countless Sderot natives whose homes had been destroyed and lives shattered in the attacks, but until this past Monday I had really never quite grasped what it all meant.

 
I arrived in Sderot a few minutes past noon on Feb. 25 and made my way to the Hesder for a meeting with the Hesder's head Rabbi along with a mother and son team, both representatives of a Jerusalem-based media placement firm who were actually in Sderot for the first time. Just minutes into the meeting, the wail of the "red color" siren pierced the calm and in a split second I realized that my luck had run out. The Rabbi who has heard the dreaded siren literally thousands of times over the past seven years, without hesitation instructed us to "run" for our lives since we were not in a safe place.
 
The nearest bomb-shelter to our location was about 40 meters away, and within 5-7 seconds of sprinting and jumping a flight of about five stairs I had made it to the door. When I landed off the stairs, I felt a shooting pain in my surgically repaired right knee, but was thankful that it held together (I owe a debt of gratitude to my surgeon).
 
I then looked back to see that the mother of the Sderot "rookies" was struggling to make it to the shelter since she was in heels. I'm sure that by now, the locals in Sderot know that a good pair of shoes can make the difference between living and dying. Without thinking twice, her son who was right behind me at the shelter door went back to assist his mother.
 
Just a few seconds after we took safety in the shelter we heard the rocket slam into the ground. The result was a deafening "boom" which shook the entire structure. My only frame of reference to feeling the ripples of such a powerful blast was when I felt the reverberations of a bus blowing up in a Jerusalem suicide bombing in 2003.
 
Some of the Hesder student/soldiers who also ran into the shelter said that they heard the "whoosh" of the Kassam indicating that it landed close by.

As I scanned the room following the incident I noticed that some of the Hesder students who were already in the shelter prior to the "code red" were actually napping and slept right through the ordeal. This particular shelter was being used as a makeshift dormitory over the past several months since the old housing units were deemed unsafe, and to the students yet another Kassam attack wasn't justification for losing crucial sleep time.
 
After several more seconds the "code red" alarm stopped and people started making their way out of the bomb shelters (Sderot has become a town of bomb shelters) to carry on with their lives, as if nothing happened. I found it disturbingly unnatural how natural it has become for people in Sderot to run for cover many times a day and then carry on as if it were part of a normal and accepted routine. My thoughts then turned to the elderly and disabled of Sderot. How is it possible that they made it to safety in those 15-20 precious seconds before the rocket landed? There is no way that many of them made it. I wonder if at this point, they even try.

After all the drama, The Rabbi, the media reps, and I resumed our meeting, but I found it extremely difficult to concentrate following such a traumatic event. I was sweating profusely and could only think about what could have happened to me, and what probably did happen to someone at "ground zero" of the attack.

At the conclusion of the meeting, about 45 minutes after the rocket landed I decided to drive to the site of the impact to find out for myself what had happened. Sderot is a relatively small town, and after getting directions from people on the street, I only had to drive a few blocks to reach my destination.
 
When I arrived, one of the locals led me to where the rocket had landed in the courtyard of three apartment buildings lined up in a "U" formation with the courtyard in the center. Most of the windows in all three building were blown out in the blast.

I was then horrified to learn that a ten year old boy suffered severe shrapnel wounds in the attack.

Dozens of emergency services personnel were still on the scene, and media crews, both local and international were covering the story. The emergency crews, along with volunteers from a crisis aide center were going door to door in the complex to see if everyone was ok. While four shock victims had already been transported to the hospital, another three were found when I was there and attended do. What I learned from this experience is that in most cases shock victims, especially the elderly, are unable to turn to anyone for help following an attack and sometimes can suffer for hours before receiving treatment.

After snapping some pictures of the damage, I noticed a commotion ensuing under one of the apartment’s ground floor overhangs near where the Kassam landed. There resting on the cement near a blood-spattered wall, was a small piece of bloodied bone and a chunk of flesh from the young victim. One of the crisis aide workers with long side-curls (payot) was guarding the bone as if his life depended on it. I heard him on his cell phone communicating with the ZAKA organization - the group which assists in the recovery and proper disposal of human remains. The aide worker did his best to prevent onlookers from taking pictures, but I managed to snap one photo. While a picture says a thousand words, I rationalized that this particular shot would say a million. 

After a few more minutes of capturing images from the day's events, I got back into my car and started driving home to Jerusalem. It has become my own personal ritual when I leave Sderot and am out of Kassam range to call my wife to let her know that I'm OK. While I made it out of Sderot unharmed and was headed back to the relative quiet of Jerusalem, my experience that day truly allowed me to empathize with the residents of Sderot, who for the most part don't have the option of getting in the car, and escaping what is an appalling reality. 

All photos courtesy of Josh Hasten