Silence in Sderot

Hamas renewed its rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza today, using longer-range missiles this time, the kind that penetrate Israeli territory far more deeply than Sderot and Ashkelon. At least three Israelis have been killed in the latest attacks.

Air raid sirens sounded in Tel Aviv this evening, as a Palestinian rocket apparently landed in the southern environs of the city:

Booms heard in Tel Aviv area following warning siren

Three Israelis killed in Kiryat Malachi; rocket falls in Eshkol wounding 3 IDF soldiers as rockets continue to fall on South; IAF strikes nearly 200 targets in Strip; 15 Palestinians killed in strikes.

Two booms were heard in Tel Aviv following an air raid siren Thursday evening, just an hour after rocket from the Gaza Strip exploded in an open field outside of Rishon Lezion.

The attacks mark the first hit in the center of the country in renewed violence from the Gaza Strip. The incident was the first time that a real siren was sounded in Tel Aviv since the Gulf War in the early 1990s. Palestinian Islamic Jihad took responsibility for the rocket on Tel Aviv.

The rockets, among over 250 fired from Gaza into the South since the IDF launched Operation Pillar of Defense Wednesday to root out the terror infrastructure in the coastal territory, landed less than 15 km south of Tel Aviv. The operation began with the Wednesday afternoon targeted killing of Ahmed Jabari, the chief of Hamas’s military wing.

Earlier Thursday, three people were killed and two others injured in a direct hit on a Kiryat Malachi apartment building. Hours later, a rocket fired into the Eshkol region injured three IDF soldiers, two moderately…

Our Israeli correspondent MC has filed this report on today’s events in southern Israel from the vantage point of Sderot:

It is Thursday morning and Sderot is totally silent
by MC

It is Thursday morning and Sderot is totally silent. We have been asked to stay off the roads, as the emergency services need to react as quickly as possible. Our son’s IDF passing-out parade scheduled for today has been cancelled. For many of the families this would have been the last opportunity to be with their sons (and daughters) before they go on active duty.

Yesterday evening became very fraught as snippets of news came in, nestling uncomfortably between the loud , window rattling mutual exchanges of aerial munitions. I phoned my daughter in Beersheva to see if my son-in-law had been called up (not yet), but in the background the wailing of the air raid sirens was audible over the telephone. The mobilisation of reserves is not good news; our young people really do not need to take up arms yet again.

In a way I was pleased at the successful attack on the senior Hamas general. In war, the old men sit comfortably in their armchairs, sipping their sherries, whilst their young men slog it out with other young man, and die for the privilege.

The IDF took out one of the old men yesterday, that was a message to all the leadership of Hamas and others to show that they too are legitimate targets. It may just save the lives of the young men, both theirs and ours.

Pie in the sky, I expect, a lovely sentiment, but this war has its irrational religious dimension where the rewards of martyrdom outweigh the vitality of continued life. I can only find contempt for a religion that sees human life as a currency that can be traded for the illusionary bounties of ‘heaven’.

Of course, we will soon be discussing the ‘disproportionate’ response by the IDF, forgetting the lengths that the IDF goes to minimise civilian casualties, when a ‘proportionate’ response would be for the citizens of Sderot, Ashkelon and Beersheva to randomly target the Gaza civilian community after agreeing on a ‘ceasefire’.

Western mainstream media today always try to hide behind the non-definition of a negative proposition, so instead of defining a ‘proportionate’ response to Hamas, the mainstream media will use the idea of a ‘disproportionate’ response which is, of course, anything which is not ‘proportionate’. To anybody unfamiliar with the philosophical difficulty of defining a negative (most people), this passes off as criticism of Israel, when in fact it is blatant propaganda.

Using this ploy, Israel’s response can always be deemed disproportionate no matter what the circumstances, I suspect that it is a carefully thought-out strategy that singles out the “Jewish State of Israel” for special treatment. Very few nation states in this world would tolerate one missile, let alone thousands, and most states would be allowed to retaliate in any way they deem necessary to secure the integrity of their border. Not so when Israel is involved — the world expects us to bow our heads to Islamic violence and apologise for our very existence.

We must ALL, as individuals, ask ourselves why the governments of the EU and the USA continue to promote Islam and to use it to destroy our cultures, because when they have finished with us here in Sderot and Israel (the ‘little’ Satan), guess who is next.