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? 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. 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. Saving a life in SderotOn Tuesday morning, as I was getting ready to leave my home, a woman's voice said "Tzeva Adom! Tzeva Adom! Tzeva Adom!" over Sderot's public speaker system. I had already heard this alarm a few times that morning, and several hundred times since I moved to Sderot. It meant that a rocket fired by Hamas in Gaza would explode somewhere in or near Sderot in about fifteen seconds. I went about my business, turning off my computer and packing my books, as I awaited the explosion. When the inevitable happened, I heard that unmistakable cracking sound at the tiny fraction of an instant, the KA of the KABOOM! It indicated that Hamas had been lucky this time and hit somebody's home, instead of their rockets landing in a field whose mud muffled the blast. One learns to pick up these subtle differences in kinds of explosion if one lives in Sderot. Less subtle was that my building shuddered, and my windows danced in their frames; I felt the slight shove of the shockwave going through my body. I knew that this Kassam rocket had landed within a few blocks of my home. Under missile fire in Ashkelon
The writer and her family are Anglos living in Ashkelon. This post was written on Monday as the first rockets hit in the morning hours. It's 12:25 in the afternoon and the city has been jumping, literally and figuratively. The morning started nice and quietly enough and since there were no alerts during the night, it lulled many of us into a false hope that the worst was behind us, that is until the first alarm of the day at about 9:15. As per drill, we (Rafi, Shani, me and the 3 dogs) all ran downstairs to my mother-in-law's hall where she was already waiting for us with her housecleaner who was muttering something in Russian, like "oy, oy, oy." Then, a massive "boom" shook the air. It was so loud that my mother-in-law (hereby referred to as "safta", Hebrew for grandma) heard it and without her 2 hearing aids, she doesn't hear a thing. We waited a few extra minutes and then the phone started ringing. Why the ceasefire never stood a chance
Back in January 2008, the German newspaper, Der Spiegel published an article covering the Kassam rocket production in Gaza. Ulrike Putz, the author of the article interviewed several Palestinians in the midst of building rockets and stirring away explosives. One Palestinian, Abdul, explained that building rockets for the Palestinian terror network, Islamic Jihad is his night job, while during the day he studies geography. Abdul, 22 at the time of the article, began producing rockets for Palestinian Islamic Jihad when he 19. I believe that the article offers significant insight into why the recent ceasefire with Hamas which began on June 21, and has completely disintegrated since early November, never stood the chance of lasting in the first place. Expectations from Sderot
December 19 is a significant day for Israeli civilians living on the other side of the Gaza Strip. It is the day where the Hamas-Israel ceasefire officially comes to an end and the question to whether Palestinian rocket fire will resume on Israelis civilians living in the south, will officially be answered. The question has been answered - to some degree - a little earlier than expected. After Israel entered the Gaza Strip to blow up a Hamas dug tunnel intended for the killing or kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, Hamas fired a massive barrage of rockets-over 60--upon Israeli civilians last week through November 4-5. Craters, glass and shrapnel
Throughout Saturday afternoon, I heard a number of alarms followed by a number of loud explosions as several rockets hit Sderot. I did not know where they had hit and I decided to go looking for them when the sun went down and the Sabbath ended. A constant problem here is that we hear the loud KABOOM! when the rocket lands, but we often have no way of knowing exactly where the explosion occurred - unless, of course, the rocket went through the roof of someone's house. We too are dependent on the news media to learn exactly what has happened, but the TV and radio do not mention the address where the rocket fell, because most of their audience does not live in Sderot. A typical day in Sderot
I begin the week working for Sderot Media Center in Sderot, realizing that I am coming to work in a middle of a war-zone. There are all kinds of indicators of Sderot being a rocket-shelled city besides the sirens and rocket explosions. Streets are emptier than usual, Sapir college usually teeming with life, has few students on campus, schools have let out traumatized students early, and the list goes on. Simply speaking to residents makes one understand that the Israelis of this region live in fear for 24 hours, seven days a week, even on days where there are only three rocket attacks. Everyday errands like buying food in the supermarket or mailing letters in the post office have become routines of terror and fear as these routines are punctuated by red alert sirens and rocket attacks. |
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