Sheltering for the Next War

Giulio Meotti
Sderot Media Center
13 July '10

Fertile, warm, and humid is the plain leading to the town of Sderot. The houses are yellow and white on the Negev, the desert dreamt by David Ben Gurion, the founder of modern Israel. Before the road leading into the town, there is a cafeteria full of Israeli soldiers in transit to military bases. It’s the border with Gaza and the Hamas rockets.

A few kilometers from here lies Havat Shikmim, the ranch of former prime minister Ariel Sharon. Once protected and fortified, the place is now neglected. The Hamas rockets have fallen near the grave of Sharon’s wife, Lily, and the flowers placed by the general have been burned by Islamist hatred. Hamas claims the Sharon ranch, which is located near Huj, an Arab village destroyed in the war of 1948.

Sderot was once famous for having one of the highest unemployment rates in Israel. Today this poor town of North African and Soviet immigrants boasts the sad record of having received the highest number of rocket attacks by Hamas. It is now the place most at risk in Israel. But severe risk also marks other southern cities, such as Ashdod, Beersheba, Netivot, and Ashkelon, the latter of which provides much of Gaza’s electricity but nevertheless is still bombarded by Grad missiles. The fact that a large part of the country is living much as those in Sderot do-running for shelter and fearing for their lives-creates a whole new sad reality: a sense of solidarity.



Bulldozers are hard at work in Sderot. Every street is dotted with concrete huts: the bus shelters have them, the souk (market) has them, and now the cranes and bulldozers are all over town making good on the government's promise to put a missile-proof security room in every Sderot home. A few days ago, another rocket fell into the city. The militants of the terrorist movement have been improving their missiles. The people in Sderot used to call them "toys made in the kitchen." Then the rockets began to kill and produce an array of disabled citizens. They are no longer considered "toys."

Sderot is preparing for the next war against Hamas. “There are 5,000 additional shelters under construction in Sderot,” says Noam Bedein, director of the Sderot Media Center. Five thousand new shelters are a huge number for a small town of just 20,000 inhabitants. That’s why Sderot was dubbed "the world capital of bomb shelters." In the courtyard of the police station are stored the remains of the launched missiles. The red ones were launched by Hamas. The yellow rockets came from the Islamic Jihad. Since the war ended in January 2009, hundreds of new rockets have fallen into the Negev desert and its kibbutzim.

In Sderot you have only 15 seconds to find a shelter once the alarm warns that Hamas has just launched a rocket. Gaza is less than a mile from here. In Sderot, many motorists do not wear seatbelts so that they can rush out of their cars when the alarm sounds. The school on the hill bears the marks of shrapnel bombs, and the army has nestled the building under huge slabs of steel. "People abroad do not realize what is happening here," says the mayor of Sderot, David Buskila, an Israeli of Moroccan descent, as are most of those who came to Sderot in the 1950s to found the city.

(Read full story)

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