D'Antonio - Wake-up call from Gaza

Credit: Zoom 77: Shikmim School in Sderot
that was hit by a kassam rocket on Saturday'
23/06/12 

Maayan D'Antonio..
Sderot Media Center..
25 June '12..

Dawn breaks on the city of Sderot; it's a Shabbat, the day of rest. But as they say, there's no rest for the wicked. Some found that it would be fun to play "alarm clock" with the people of Sderot.

It's six o'clock AM when “Tseva Adom” alarm echoes across the city. Getting out of bed is an afterthought for most. Yet the head does not quite stay on the pillow when a sound, as loud as a clap of thunder, rips through the air. It is a clear day: the rockets have landed inside the city's limits (bull's eye).

The ripples of the hit cause car alarms to go off across the city, the window panes to shake in their frames, and people to run to the safe-rooms. That is, unless your skin has grown thick and your brain slow to react to something so common; after all, it is only six AM. So we cover our heads and turn to the other side, hoping to go back to sleep, denying this all the while.

Not ten minutes pass when the alarm goes off twice more, followed closely (twenty seconds to be exact) by the deafening sound of crashing; more car alarms are set off and whine about the city streets. At this point it is clear even to the foggiest minds that one would be better off in the safe-room and not in bed - even though one only slept two hours.

It is an hour- long attack with more than twenty rockets falling in and around the city. And all we can do is hang around listening to the alarm in intervals with the crashes. I find myself on a couch, sleep-groggy, staring at Facebook and reading my friend's status up-dates. Most of them echo the fact that we received a six o'clock wake-up call, or THAT-WAS-CLOSE!!!

All in all it is a daze of an hour, one that passed by fairly quickly. An hour to sit and contemplate whether to study or go back to bed. In the end all I could think of was "Is it a bird, is it a plane, no, it is a kassam!"

Link: http://sderotmedia.org.il/bin/content.cgi?ID=911&q=1&s=5

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