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Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2008 08:49:56 -0500 (EST)
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Bombarded by rockets, an Israeli town reels
By Steven Erlanger The New York Times
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Less then two months ago, Raziel Sasson emerged from his rocket-proof closet, willing now to sleep just outside it, with the rest of his family, on mattresses circled on the living room floor.
Raziel, 13, and known as Razi, still gets his father, Moshe, up three times a night to walk him to the bathroom and stand guard outside it. Sometimes he sleeps between his parents, said his mother, Shula, 45, and sometimes he does not sleep at all.
Four years ago, Razi was climbing a tree to retrieve a soccer ball when a Qassam rocket, fired from nearby Gaza, flew over his head and exploded nearby. He remembers the spinning contrail of the crude rocket and its fierce whistle. The shock of the blast blew him to the ground.
"I grabbed the tree, but I flew out," he said. "I felt my knees attached to my stomach."
In the four years since, Sderot, a working-class town of immigrants less than three kilometers, or two miles, from northern Gaza, has been hit with about 2,000 rockets, according to the Israeli police. Twenty-two have hit in the last eight days. Eight Sderot residents have been killed by the rockets that fall almost randomly from the sky.
Razi has seen 15 therapists. "He wouldn't leave the house to go to school for a year," Shula said. "He wouldn't take a shower upstairs. He wouldn't sleep alone. He would hold on to me and his father. He wouldn't to go the toilet alone. If a door closed too hard, he would wet his pants."
Finally his older brother, Rafi, 22, decided to do what the state would not. Using his exit pay from the army, roughly $4,000, Rafi built Raziel a little bomb shelter of his own in the living room, with a steel door and heavy cement walls, and Razi used it like a concrete cocoon.
"I had to do something for him," Rafi said. "He was completely paralyzed."
Shula threw up her hands. "This is life in Sderot," she said.
The government and the military have been unable to stop the rockets, which are easy to launch, and officials have moved slowly to fortify this small, angry and anxious town, whose residents are as trapped by the conflict as the ordinary Palestinians of Gaza - unable to stop the fighting or have much lasting political impact on their leaders.
The problems of Sderot - and of a Gaza run by Hamas - are at the heart of Israel's fundamental security concerns. But those concerns, like Hamas itself, are present only in the abstract in the American-led peace process begun in November at Annapolis, Maryland, which features negotiations between Israel and the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, who has no control over Hamas or Gaza.
President George W. Bush arrives in Israel on Wednesday to try to give some impetus to the talks. But his visit and the talks themselves seem irrelevant to the people here, who worry only that his presence will prompt Palestinians who oppose negotiations to send a larger barrage of Qassams on Sderot.
"When Bush comes, he should come to Sderot," said Moshe Sasson, 49, who gets up before 6 every morning to get the bus to his job as a prison warden in Beersheba. "What do we matter to Annapolis?" he asked. "For seven years now, we're just pushed into the corner, while life elsewhere in Israel goes on as normal."
The Israeli Army has installed a system to warn of incoming rockets. Suddenly, throughout a placid, sunny Sderot, a tinny woman's voice echoes on loudspeakers, intoning, "Tseva Adom, Tseva Adom," or "color red." Residents have no clue where the rockets may land, but know they have only 15 to 20 seconds to find shelter.
With a population of 24,000 down unofficially to perhaps 17,000, the people of Sderot live in a most un-Israeli hush, so they can hear the alerts.
The man in the market who sits on a stool and yells out the prices of his cheap underwear has been told to stop using a megaphone.
People sleep with the heating system off and a window open on the coldest night. There is no muzak in the grocery store. People keep their car windows open and their radios and televisions on low volume, even in the town's few bars or pubs.
They take quick showers, afraid to miss an alert, no longer sleep in upstairs bedrooms and avoid public places at what are considered peak Qassam times.
And when the alert sounds, people drop everything - including their unpaid groceries in the aisles, costing him more than $100 a day, said Daniel Dahan, who owns "Super Dahan," the grocery his father started - to run to one of the square concrete shelters, known as "betonadas," after the word for cement, that increasingly dot the town. Then they pull out their cellphones, to check on their children.
"What kind of life is this, when you can't even make your home safe for your children?" Shula Sasson asked. Their house, like most in Sderot, was built before the first Gulf War and lacks a "safe room," protected against rocket attack. Under political pressure, the government has been reinforcing schools, building betonadas and has began a survey to see how much it would cost to provide every home a "safe room."
One of the surveyors, working under contract, said that in her third of Sderot, there were 1,700 houses and apartments without safe rooms; they would cost an estimated $25,000 each to install.
The Sassons have another son, Aviran, 19, who just finished his basic training. In May 2006, he was finishing his prayers at school when a Qassam landed in the classroom next door. It stuck in the floor but did not explode. Aviran, too, required therapy and tranquilizers.
A little over two weeks ago, on Dec. 13, Shula's daughter, Nofit, 21, was on the roof terrace hanging out laundry when she heard the red alert and then saw a Qassam whistling toward her. She ran screaming down the stairs. The rocket hit the house next door, exploding and embedding itself in the wall between the two houses, just next to canisters of bottled gas, shattering windows and cracking walls.
"Razi was on his bike," Shula said. "I heard the explosion and saw the smoke and ran to the door of the house, and I met him there," she said. "And I felt a huge pressure in my chest and I fell, and he started screaming and crying to see me on the ground."
She looked over the holed wall to the ruined house next door. "It's good that people know, even at the end of a spoon, what people go through here," Shula said. "It's too bad we can't enjoy what we have. This is such a good town."
In the quiet city center, surrounded by a choice of betonadas, a smiling Razi was riding his bike. During the alert that day, he said calmly, he ran to a shelter. Then, in the sky, there was the low sound of airplanes, and suddenly he was transformed, his body rigid, his eyes locked into a stare of panic. "Did you hear?" he asked urgently. "Did you hear?"
"They're your planes, Israeli planes," he was told, but he stayed rigid. "No, no," he said. "They'll shoot back," and his eyes swiveled with fear, hunting for a shelter.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/08/africa/israel.php
