Sderot's residents are fed up with Goldstone
Sderot and western Negev residents experienced another week of sporadic rocket fire from northern Gaza as the General Assembly of the United Nations began its debate on the Goldstone probe into alleged Israeli war crimes, on Wednesday, November 4. Two days before the General Assembly debate began, a rocket fired from northern Gaza triggered the Color Red alarm system in Sderot, sending residents racing to the city's newly built bomb shelters. The rocket landed in the Sha'ar HaNegev region, about five minutes away from Sderot. There were no injuries or damage reported. A week earlier, another rocket struck an open field in the Eshkol region of the western Negev. The director of the Sderot Mental Health Center, Dr. Adriana Katz, recently spoke to Sderot Media Center about the UN's indifference to the mental health crisis which has resulted from years of a rocket attacks on the city. "Judge Goldstone knows nothing of the Israeli trauma victims whose lives have become hell because of these rocket attacks. They can no longer go to work. Every noise, bleep or beep sends them into a panic, and they suffer daily from fear and insecurity," says Katz, who immigrated to Israel from Romania and lives with her family in Ashkelon, has served as the head psychiatrist of the Sderot Mental Health Center for 15 years. "The Sderot Mental Health Center has 6,500 patient files that have opened as a result of the trauma symptoms experienced by Sderot residents," she said. "There is no post-trauma reality here in Sderot. The number of patients is growing every day. There are residents who need years of rehabilitation before they will be able to function normally again." Dr. Katz specifically refers to the generation of "Kassam children," or children who have grown up under the intense pressure of rocket fire and continue to wet their beds at night while fearing to leave their homes. "You cannot photograph a destroyed psyche and broadcast it all over the world," she said. "It is clear that Goldstone and his committee have been significantly impacted by the footage of Gaza from the three-week Operation Cast Lead. But we have nine years of rocket attacks that have severely damaged Jewish children and adults. And their plight has been completely ignored by the UN." "Would Judge Goldstone agree to live under such conditions?" Rockets for Rosh Hashana
It's true there were no physical casualties from last night's rocket fire - but that doesn't explain what happened here in Sderot last night. My family lives in Silver Spring, Maryland - thousands of miles away from where I live and work. I spent the family-oriented holiday Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, with amazing families in Sderot, Israel where I work and live. After a long day of eating, drinking, and celebrating I arrived home to take a relaxing shower and go to bed. As I got out of the shower the night silence was lit up, my heart began to race and my legs quivered. The echoing Tzeva Adom (Color Red) reverberated in my first-floor apartment in Sderot as I huddled in its most sheltered area - the corner of the kitchen next to the refrigerator. Then, suddenly, the deafening silence following the alarm was broken by a not-so-distant explosion. I work for the Sderot Media Center , and two Kassam rockets had just clocked me in at just before 1 a.m. - I was out the door, running down the street to get my camera. Why has the world bought into this misconception that the rockets have stopped as more than 250 have struck Israel in the past eight months? 'There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza'
On September 10 alone, over 89 trucks of international aid and gasoline poured into the Gaza Strip. Since September 1, over 700 truckloads of international aid, including over 1,760,000 liters of gasoline, have been sent into Gaza. Since the end of Operation Cast Lead on January 18, over 2,000 truckloads - over 37,000 tons - of humanitarian aid has been delivered to the Gaza Strip. As international uproar over the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip continues, Guy Inbar, spokesman for the Israel Civil Administration, which manages the Palestinian Authority's requests for aid, goods and gasoline, says that these are in fact decreased amounts. "Over the past two to three months we have seen a definitive decrease in the requests from the Palestinian Authority, because they have goods, foods, and medicines that still have not been used," said Inbar, adding that, "As we have said before, there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza." While I sat for hours, watching truck after truck drive in and out of the Gaza Strip, Dr. Adriana Katz, director of three of Sderot's mental health and trauma treatment centers, told me over the phone that there has been no change in the lack of funding for the Sderot centers. Sderot students ready for school bells - and rocket sirens
Although the third Hamas-Israel cease-fire is still in effect, Sderot schoolchildren began the 2009 school year both excited and apprehensive. Two days before the doors to Sderot's nine schools opened, on Sunday, August 30, two rockets fired from Gaza triggered the city's rocket warning system, known as the Color Red siren, and sent residents racing for a shelter. "I was scared but not surprised," says Rotem, a 16-year-old Sderot student beginning eleventh grade at a local Sderot high school. "We know that the rocket attacks will begin again and I don't think that anyone here really believes that the quiet will last. We've lived here [in Sderot] long enough to know that," she said. Dina Huri, principal of a Sderot elementary school, made sure the new school year would offer everything to her first to sixth grade students, including upgraded school shelters against future rocket attacks. "During the summer, I had the three school bomb shelters made 'kid-friendly,'" she said. Huri had the shelter painted in bright colors, and installed rugs so the children would feel more comfortable. She doesn't remember the exact date the shelters were first installed - "they've been around for a while" - but said the original concrete grey slabs made children feel imprisoned. "Last year, every time the siren blared, the students had to run into these concrete structures, wondering when they could leave. Now these shelters are places that the students want to play in," she said. In any case, Sderot residents had another reason to expect rocket fire on the opening day of this school year. Humanizing Hamas: An NYTimes objective gone wrong
The New York Times recently published an interview with Hamas's political chief, Khaled Mashal, entitled Addressing US, Hamas Says It Grounded Rockets. In the interview, the Times takes a very sympathetic approach to Hamas leader, who was just elected to his fourth term as Hamas's political bureau chief, the post he has held since 2004. The Times attempts to portray a new more "moderate" Mashal, in the hopes that Hamas is actually turning a new leaf. In the article, The Times quotes Mashal as asking Americans to disregard the Hamas charter, (steeped in anti-Semitic declarations), while also stating that Iran does "not control or affect Hamas policies." The Times also quotes Mashal saying that Hamas has no interest in bringing strict Muslim law into Gaza. Holocaust Remembrance Day: The tragedy of silence
Yesterday, Israel marked Holocaust Remembrance Day. Standing on a street in Sderot, I listened quietly to the siren sound, remembering the tragedy of 6 million Jews killed in Nazi Europe, my great grandparents, uncles and aunts from Poland among them. I've become used to sirens sounding in Sderot during my past two years here-the click of the intercom, followed by a female voice that calmly repeats Tzeva Adom, Tzeva Adom, or Color Red. The scenes that unfold usually entail people dashing into shelters-racing for 15 seconds that may mean the difference between life and death. Human Rights for Sderot residents
Liraz Madmony, 23 of Sderot, grew up under Palestinian rocket fire. Although a rocket has never directly hit her home, Liraz has experienced the terror of rocket explosions countless times over the past eight years. "We don't have a bomb shelter in our house," she says. "Every time, the Tzeva Adom is set off, our family races to the shower, the only room that is most 'secure' from a rocket attack." Liraz, a law student in a Ramat Gan college in central Israel, is heavily involved with student organizations such as WUJS (World Union of Jewish Students). "Many times I've missed my law classes and student activities because of the rocket attacks. It's almost impossible to lead a normal life when you are forced to live under with warning alerts and raining rockets." Defining war crimes
Type in 'war crimes' in Google and you get both the Wikpedia definition and examples of countries associated with the term including Japan, US, and...Israel. The coupling of 'war crime' and Israel is not new, and indeed much of the international media and foreign leadership favors using the term to describe Israel's current offensive operations in the Gaza Strip. The Wall Street Journal on January 10, published an article entitled "Israel is Committing War Crimes" by George Bisharat. Bisharat writes that "Israel's current assault on the Gaza Strip cannot be justified by self-defense. Rather, it involves serious violations of international law, including war crimes." Averaging one grad per hour
There we were, a sunny Monday morning, averaging maybe one grad per hour from about 10:30 am when once again, the siren wailed. We ran downstairs under a hallway in my mother-in-law's house. My neice and one of my sons were with her and just as we got to the hall, this enormous "BOOM!" shook the house. "It's here!" my son and husband yelled together. "Nobody move!" We waited for less than a minute (although you have to wait 5 but we couldn't) and ran outside, noticing that the window over the kitchen sink had a huge hole in it and what was left was all cracked. Smoke was coming from the houses across the street and at first, we thought it was there. Then we thought it had landed around our friends' house behind those houses and knowing Miki was alone and on the hysterical side, ran over to her house. The soldiers are all my sons
I just came back from a 2 day "vacation" in Rishon, out of rocket range. It was very strange: kids going to school, people walking along the streets, stopping to look in shop windows, no one in a hurry...simple, everyday occurrences which have come to a complete stop here in Ashkelon (and in the other areas in rocket range) and which I will never take for granted again. Sadly, we lost one of our soldiers yesterday, and when I use the pronoun "our", I mean "our". Israel may be the only country in the world that puts a picture of the soldier(s) killed on the front page with a brief bio in the 2nd-3rd page of the newspapers. The TV, radio and print media also announce when and where the funeral will be held, because in a country as small as ours, everyone knows someone in the army and someone always knows someone who knows someone who knows the deceased. Also, because we are so small, we really are one family; strangers will go out of their way to go to the funerals, and everyone weeps, some outwardly, but all of us in our hearts. |
 |
 
Combined feed for all JPost.com blogs
Top Rated Posts
Tags:Blogroll |
Comments (4)
