PHILIP JACOBSON - More by this author » Last updated at 17:58pm on 15th February 2008
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/live/live.html?in_article_id=514681&in_page_id=1889
On a parched strip of the Israeli/Palestinian border, a dustbowl frontier town has a unique boast: per head of population, it is the most heavily bombed in the world. Philip Jacobson spends time in Sderot
A bright winter's morning, and nothing is stirring in the barren stretch of no-man's-land that separates the little Israeli town of Sderot from the turbulent Gaza Strip one mile away. On the Palestinian side of the frontline, sunlight glints off the windscreen of a truck parked beside a crumbling farmhouse where the washing has been hung out to dry.
Nonetheless, my guide has insisted on talking me through the local ground rules again:
1. I am not to fasten my seat belt. This is the only place in Israel where seat belts are forbidden. Buckling up prevents drivers and their passengers getting out of a vehicle quickly.
2. I am not to play my car radio. It may drown out the warnings.
3. I am not to have a shower if there is nobody else in the house to hear the alarms. Last month, a woman who ignored this rule was washing her hair when she was blown off her feet.
4. Be extra vigilant when it's misty. It can confuse the laser-activated warning systems.
And suddenly it comes, a noise like the slamming of a heavy door as a sleek, six-foot-long Qassam rocket bursts into the cloudless blue sky.
Its trajectory is marked by a trail of white smoke as it curves towards the town. Almost simultaneously, sirens begin to wail.
A woman's urgent voice repeats the words, "Tseva Adom, Tseva Adom," over public address loudspeakers.
In Hebrew this means, "Code Red".
It signifies a missile is on its way.
Sderot's jittery residents have no more than 15 seconds to take cover before the rocket hits.
On this occasion, they will have to wait there for a long time.
For the next 72 hours Code Red alerts will sound almost continuously; Islamic militant groups in Gaza have begun raining the first of more than 100 rockets on to the town during a terrifying three-day attack.
Most miss or fizzle out.
But there's always a few that find a target.
The streets empty as families hunker down under the bombardment.
The emergency services can barely cope.
One veteran paramedic, Haim Ben-Shimol, is on duty when he hears that his five-year-old granddaughter, Lior, has been wounded as she and her mother scrambled for cover.
Later, he will tell me how he found her covered in blood.
"I had to wash her face to see where she was hurt, then I bandaged her and raced to hospital in the ambulance," he recalls.
Doctors removed shards of metal from Lior's body and put a cast on her fractured arm and leg.
When the attack finally peters out, people emerge from the shelters, some deep in shock, to discover wrecked homes, shops and offices, freshly cratered streets and jagged lumps of shrapnel embedded in the concrete "life shields" that double as bus stops.
Miraculously, nobody has been killed.
Yet, as they count their blessings, many residents wonder aloud how much longer they can endure life under fire in what some describe, with gallows humour, as "the biggest bull's-eye on the map of Israel".
Because of its proximity to the border and the concentration of Hamas-led amateur bomb-makers on the other side, Sderot has a unique civic claim: on a rocket-per-head-of-population basis, it is the most targeted town in Israel, indeed the world.
It is more than six years since the first rocket was launched from Gaza.
Since then, well over 2,000 Qassams – named after a fiery Muslim preacher – have landed in or around the town killing 13 people (including four children) and injuring several dozen more.
Since the beginning of this year, at least 300 rockets have been fired.
Last Saturday, two brothers were badly wounded when a rocket caught them in the open in the centre of town.
Eight-year-old Osher Twito lost a leg, and Rami, 19, suffered multiple shrapnel injuries.
To be sure, over the same six-year period, a lot more innocent blood has been shed in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other communities, as Palestinian suicide bombers strike at crowded buses, hotels and cafés.
Even the brief war in Lebanon during the summer of 2006 claimed the lives of some 40 Israeli civilians along the country's northern border.
But beyond the grim arithmetic of body counts, Sderot is a special case because nowhere else in Israel do ordinary people face the draining pressure of coping day in, day out with the fear that a rocket could fall at any moment.
"Everybody here lives on the very edge of their nerves," says Noam Bedein, a young Israeli journalist who moved to Sderot several years ago.
"The peak time for Qassam attacks is while people are going to and from work and at the beginning and end of school.
"Believe me, that really grinds you down, mentally and physically."
While the psychological fall-out from the rocket attacks affects young and old, poor and prosperous alike, the cruellest impact has been on Sderot's children.
A recent survey concluded that almost one-third of those aged between four and 18 now suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, while many more exhibit the symptoms of severe anxiety and feelings of helplessness that warn of more serious problems to come.
The fact that ten-year-olds receive daily tranquillisers demonstrates how they are being robbed of a normal childhood.
Only in Sderot will you find school runs conducted with military precision, as security guards rush children to and from coaches and parents' cars at staggered intervals to guard against a Qassam falling among a crowd.
Such a disaster was narrowly averted late last year at the Haroeh School, a two-storey building covered by an enormous metal "umbrella" protecting the roof.
At 8am one day, as pupils were filing into the school for assembly, the Code Red alarm sounded.
Footage shot by a video crew who happened to be there showed terrified children running for their lives towards the school entrance.
Seconds later a rocket slammed into a clump of trees beside the school, narrowly missing a kindergarten.
"We just heard a big explosion next to us and the glass in the windows shattered," says music teacher Asia Weissenberg.
Aware that Qassams are often fired in salvoes, she and colleagues quickly shepherded the shaken children into the school's reinforced shelter with a minimum of fuss.
"They do get scared, of course," Weissenberg says, "but if they can see that we are calm, that helps to reassure them."
For many, this precarious existence has become too much: at least 3,000 of Sderot's population of 24,000 have already left, most of them for good. Many more would do so if they could sell their houses.
The sensation of living in and moving about Sderot is unique.
At the open-air market, there is none of the cheerful hubbub found in other Israeli towns, no blaring radios or raucous stallholders.
An underwear salesman who used a megaphone to advertise his bargains has been silenced by popular demand.
"Almost every time I come here, rockets have fallen really close," says Esa, a nonchalant Bedouin youth presiding over a blanket spread with cut-price household goods.
The recent attacks, which knocked out power supplies, have done wonders for sales of torches and candles.
"Nobody wants to have to shelter in the dark," he says.
As we pass a square where people are taking advantage of unseasonally warm weather to dawdle over pavement coffee tables or gossip on park benches, Noam Bedein points out how nobody has strayed more than a few yards from the nearest shelter.
"Everyone's nightmare is being caught in the open when the alarm sounds," he observes.
"You find yourself calculating how long it will take to get to safety."
If you can't make it, he advises, head for the nearest stairwell or kneel beside a solid-looking wall, your head down and hands behind your neck.
Since Qassams sometimes arrive in salvoes, it is risky to get up immediately after one has exploded.
Bedein explains how the Code Red system, triggered when a network of lasers detects the sudden increase in heat generated by a rocket launch, is by no means infallible.
In certain weather conditions, particularly heavy ground mist, attacks can go undetected.
In May last year, 32-year-old Shirel Feldman died of her wounds after a Qassam that fell without warning riddled her car with shrapnel.
At the height of the recent three-day bombardment, Shlomi Argon's house was hit just as the alarm began to sound.
His wife and a five-year-old boy who had been playing with his son were both sprayed with shrapnel.
"Neither was badly hurt, as it turns out, but it's like Russian roulette around here," Argon recalls shakily.
"Who knows if we'll be so lucky next time?"
You can tell from the pile of cigarette butts in Dr Adriana Katz's ashtray that it has been another difficult day at the Hosen Centre, where she is in charge of treating victims of shock in Sderot.
Every Qassam attack brings a batch of new patients to her cluttered office, many in tears, shaking uncontrollably, barely able to get their words out.
A middle-aged woman in the waiting room sits with her head in her hands, legs trembling.
When I met her last year, Dr Katz, a striking figure with a mane of grey hair and rings on every finger, confided gloomily that the mental-health situation in Sderot was deteriorating fast.
Today, she says, it is "catastrophic and getting worse".
The symptoms of distress don't change, but become more intense with every direct hit.
"Mobile phones start ringing after each attack and in this little place bad news spreads fast."
The greatest challenge Dr Katz faces is preventing shock victims developing full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder.
"The text-book treatment is group therapy or one-on-one counselling that will prepare patients for a return to some sort of normality," she says.
"But all we can do here is send people back to their houses and offices to await the next Qassam, which just creates fresh circles of despair."
It's hardly surprising, Dr Katz suggests, that many people in Sderot opt to get by on heavy doses of tranquillisers and "of course, smoking like chimneys". (Israel's ban on lighting up in public places is comprehensively flouted by the people of Sderot.)
Many of the mothers waiting to collect children from the school tell strikingly similar stories of regular nightmares, bed-wetting and a pervasive sense of insecurity caused by the attack.
Hava Gad's son Yanai, nine, was a bright and forward child, out of nappies before his second birthday, but he is now paralysed by fear whenever the Code Red alert sounds and insists on sharing his parents' bed.
"Imagine what that does for a normal married relationship.
"He won't leave the house without us, even to play with friends next door, because he thinks a rocket will hit him."
During a recent attack, a Qassam exploded not far from Gad's home.
"My son began to hyperventilate, then he soiled himself," she recalls.
"That happens almost every time now."
Yanai's anxiety was compounded when another rocket hit the factory where his father, Tsfania, works.
"He worries about being too far away from the protected safe room in our house or something terrible happening at his school."
Unsurprisingly, Gad, 42, has herself been affected by the constant tension and uncertainty, taking Valium regularly and attending Dr Katz's clinic for therapy.
Dina Hoori, 44, head teacher at the local primary school for the past ten years, knows all too well how the dangers affect Sderot families.
"It's particularly tragic that parents often feel they've failed children because they can't do anything to stop the rockets," she says.
Located in an area where rockets have struck quite often, the school is only partially protected against Qassam attacks and the playground is usually out of bounds.
"The Government won't provide funding to reinforce the entire structure," Hoori observes with a grimace.
On one occasion, a Qassam fell close by just as the school opened in the morning, injuring one of the youngest girls.
"Happily she's back with us, but you feel it's only a matter of time before there's a direct hit when the children are in the open."
Another head teacher, Liora Fima, finds it heartbreaking to watch pupils gradually becoming "normalised by terror", seemingly resigned to a life under the rockets.
"One five-year-old girl who suffered panic attacks told her mother, "Mama, I think I want to die." The poor woman was crying her eyes out in her child's classroom."
I asked Fima if she ever spoke to her pupils about the suffering of school children in Gaza, whose lives are constantly distorted by bloody clashes between rival Palestinian factions and terrifying raids by Israeli troops.
She was silent for a moment, then said: "I know there are good people in Gaza who dream of peace as we do, but their leaders are fanatics, happy to sacrifice the lives of their own children. The school books over there are full of hatred for the Jews."
In the courtyard of Sderot's police station, where scores of rocket casings are stacked on shelves, each numbered and dated, a young woman officer of Ethiopian descent displays the scorched and twisted remains of a Qassam launched the previous day.
Sara Vavshet points out the slogan in Arabic painted on its fuselage, explaining that "each of the terrorist organisations uses its own colours and emblems, and they sometimes send threatening messages in Hebrew" (the Hamas faction that now rules Gaza favours the red, green and white of the Palestinian flag).
Vavshet was friendly with the families of two children, aged two and four, who were killed by Hamas rockets within a few days of each other in 2004.
Most Qassams are assembled in Gaza's little machine shops, using lengths of iron drainpipes or lampposts (including, it has been rumoured, a consignment donated by the EU) with crude metal fins soldered on to provide stability in flight.
Propelled by a combustible fuel blend of oil, raw alcohol, sugar and fertiliser, early models had a maximum range of five miles and packed just one pound of explosives to scatter the payload of nuts, bolts and scrap metal.
Launched from metal racks and lacking a guidance system, they were highly inaccurate, but served the purpose of keeping Sderot's residents permanently on edge.
According to journalist Noam Bedein, the rockets' destructive capacity has steadily increased over the past couple of years.
"We know the terrorists experiment continually with fuel mixes and shrapnel payloads.
"That's already led to the development of missiles that pack more than 20lb of explosive and can travel more than 15 miles."
Several such rockets have already struck the industrial city of Ashkelon, which contains one of Israel's largest oil terminals.
"Qassams are also becoming more accurate," Bedein says.
"The militants learn from Israeli radio reports where a particular rocket has landed, then adjust the angle of launch next time."
Despite heavy electronic surveillance of the border zone and regular strikes, Israel's military still cannot prevent hit-and-run attacks.
From a vantage point on the edge of Sderot, Bedein once watched a Qassam team setting up on the roof of a Palestinian apartment building.
"Those guys were really slick," he recalls.
"By the time I heard the explosions, they were already making a getaway." After ducking into a police station during yet another Code Red, I visit a family living nearby whose home was hit the previous day.
"Luckily we were at a friend's party when it happened," Shlomo Ben-Zaken, 46, tells me, "but the effect this had on my son Eliran was disastrous."
A gangling, expressionless 22-year-old, Eliran seems to be lost in a world of his own, padding silently behind us from room to room as we inspect the damage.
"He had psychiatric problems before the Qassams began to fall, but over the past 18 months he has become deeply depressed.
"He spends all his time on the computer and is scared stiff of leaving the house."
Encouraged by his father, Eliran produces a treasured Manchester United replica shirt, whispering something in Hebrew.
"He wants to know if you can help him attend a game at Old Trafford." For 15 years, Ben-Zaken worked side-by-side with Palestinians in Gaza's industrial zone, making several close friends.
One saved his life when he fell into a diabetic coma.
Terrorist attacks ended cross-border economic co-operation, but Ben-Zaken still keeps in touch by mobile phone.
"They're ordinary working guys, just like me, and they also suffer when Israel retaliates."
With few exceptions, Sderot residents believe that their Government couldn't care less about their plight.
"If Qassams started hitting Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, it would be a national emergency," says one shopkeeper, whose business is clearly failing.
"The politicians drop in for a quick visit, tell us to stay brave and resolute, then disappear.
"They don't want to know about the 800 houses that still lack properly protected safe rooms, or the endless problems people have claiming compensation for rocket damage."
When the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, came to town in his armoured limousine last month, accompanied by TV cameras, he was greeted by posters declaring: "Olmert's Government. No Security. No Protection. You've Failed. Go Home."
Yet for all that, something akin to the spirit of the London Blitz persists in Sderot, whether it is the elderly Russian immigrants drinking tea in the cafés and insisting that they will stay put, or the proprietor of the Shufan Ladies Hair Salon, whose latest creation resembles a Qassam rocket.
One afternoon while I was in Sderot, a battered truck pulled up in the town centre and disgorged several Orthodox Jews in their trademark long black coats and broad brimmed hats.
A sound system was quickly erected and started blasting out Israeli folk songs at top volume while they capered around on the pavement, curly side locks swinging.
Pausing for breath, their leader told me that it was their mission to bring a little light relief to Sderot's residents.
"Aren't you worried that the music is so loud you could miss a Red Alert?" I asked.
He smiled broadly, then said: "We leave that in the hands of the Almighty."
And then there is the mayor, Eli Moyal, a fast-talking lawyer who was born and bred in the town and likes to recall that when he took the job a decade ago, "I thought I'd be dealing with stuff like schools, leisure centres and rubbish collection."
An accomplished self-publicist, Moyal announced his resignation last December in protest against Government inaction, then allowed himself to be persuaded to stay.
He has staged "Solidarity with Sderot" demonstrations all over Israel, and once led a march of residents to the border with the Gaza Strip to brandish mocked-up Qassams at the Palestinian side.
When a TV reporter informed him that Hamas leaders had threatened to drive the Jews out of Sderot, he seized the microphone and announced: "I am Eli Moyal, looking straight into the eyes of the terrorists to tell them that we've been standing firm against their rockets for the past seven years.
"We will do so for the next seven hundred."
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