Israelis, sipping Pepsi, watch bombardment of Gaza town
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Shashank Bengali / MCT
Avi Pilchick (seated, foreground in white shirt) observes military operations in the Gaza Strip along with other Israeli civilians from a hilltop in Sderot, Israel. | View larger image
By Shashank Bengali | McClatchy Newspapers
SDEROT, Israel — A tower of white smoke rose from the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun after another Israeli bombardment Monday morning, and a half-dozen Israelis, perched on a dusty hilltop, gazed at the scene like armchair military strategists.
Avi Pilchick took a long swig of Pepsi and propped a foot on the plastic patio chair he'd carried up the hillside to watch the fighting. "They are doing good," Pilchick, 20, said of Israeli forces battling Palestinian militants in Gaza, "but they can do more."
Somewhere in Beit Hanoun, Ashraf El-Masri's family cowered in their concrete tenement home, their neighborhood surrounded by Israeli soldiers. El-Masri said that five residents had been killed by Israeli shelling that morning, and the blasts had traumatized the youngest of his nine children into a terrified silence.
The scenes were separated by less than two miles, but they illustrated the dramatically different perspectives on Israel's ground incursion into the Gaza Strip on its second full day.
While the Israeli spectators watched with hope that the invasion would finally stop the militant Islamic group Hamas from lobbing crude rockets from Gaza into their towns, the cost of that operation for now is borne by Palestinian families, who are trapped in their homes, their electricity cut off and their food supplies dwindling.
"No one leaves his house," said El-Masri, a taxi driver.
As one of the closest towns to the Israeli border, Beit Hanoun is a primary launching point for the militants' rockets, many of which are homemade, short-range and pack relatively little explosive power. In 2006, Israeli forces staged a major, six-day operation against militants in Beit Hanoun and killed 62 people. Palestinian medical officials said that at least 20 were civilians.
The operation didn't stop the rockets, however, and Sderot, a town of about 20,000 people, has been the most frequently hit. On Monday morning at around 11, the familiar warning of incoming rocket fire — a booming Hebrew voice announcing, "Red color, red color" — echoed through Sderot, and residents scrambled into shelters for cover.
One rocket crashed through the roof of an empty marketplace in Sderot and another struck a neighborhood a few hundred yards away, but paramedics who were on the scene within minutes said that no one was seriously wounded.
About 30 rockets landed on southern Israel on Monday, Israeli news media reported. Rocket fire has killed four Israeli civilians since the offensive against Hamas began 10 days ago.
A short while later, on the hilltop overlooking Beit Hanoun, Pilchick squinted into the sharp sunlight. He'd taken time off from his job at a foreign exchange bureau in Jerusalem and driven down to Sderot with a friend on Saturday, the day the ground operation opened.
After watching the fighting for two days, Pilchick pronounced that significant curtailment of rocket fire — which Israeli officials have cited as the main reason for the offensive — was the only way that Israel could claim victory.
"They have to stop the rockets," he said. "If they don't do that, they haven't changed anything."
Sderot residents — some of them carrying binoculars — have gathered on the hilltop since the offensive began for a glimpse of the fighting, but little was clear Monday morning besides the pop of outgoing Israeli shells and the occasional helicopter gunship overhead. Pilchick was the only spectator who brought chairs and snacks including bread, cheese and a can of olives.
Moti Danino, bundled in a sweater and cotton overcoat, said his 20-year-old son was a platoon commander in Gaza. Three years ago, a rocket fell in his garden and lightly wounded his two daughters.
"My son is in there fighting for the daughters. It is a good thing," Danino said. Still, he added, "What parent wouldn't worry if his son is fighting?"
In their darkened home in Beit Hanoun, Ashraf El-Masri's children were in utter distress. No one has stepped outside since Israeli ground forces entered the town Saturday night, and more Israeli shelling awakened them Monday morning, including a strike on a nearby mosque.
El-Masri's 12-year-old son, Abdelatif, has suddenly begun to wet the bed. His 10-year-old, Ahmad, a talented soccer player and popular kid in the neighborhood, spends the days hiding in a corner of the room where the whole family now sleeps. Four-year-old Mahmoud, usually a nonstop talker, is barely saying a word.
The smell of fresh fruit, vegetables and bread used to waft through the house, but for several days the family has eaten only lentils and rice.
El-Masri knew that Israeli forces would target Beit Hanoun. For now, all he can do is hope that it ends soon.
"We have always stood against the launching of rockets from our area because it has always made us a target of Israeli aggression," El-Masri said. "We have protested to Hamas many times. But there is no law in the Gaza Strip."
MORE FROM MCCLATCHY:
Civilian casualties rise as Israel presses in on Gaza City
On visit, Israeli foreign minister is greeted by Hamas rockets
Hamas, long the peace spoiler, finds it hard to halt attacks
McClatchy Newspapers 2008
Why is the State of Israel surprised that people in the United States (a) no longer buy into their "poor me" propaganda?
When I story begins: "Israel says" --- most Americans now treat it the
same as if a story begins "Bush says." We know it's going to be a lie.
It's been a lie for at least eight years.
Frankly, we no longer believe either of you.
I wasn't alive during the days of the wars with the American
Indians. I take no ownership of what happened 200 years ago -- and I
feel no guilt.
I was two years old during the eithnic cleansing of Jews in Europe. I
take no ownership of what happened then, and I feel no guilt.
I see what is going on in the Mid-East, in the year 2008, and I am appalled that any one people can inflict upon another --- such horror, misery, and total devastation.
This I own, and if I did not speak out against it, I would be no better than the people in Europe who allowed the Holocaust, by their silence.
I believe that the people in Gaza have the same rights to self defense, as do the people in Israel. There are "terrorists" on both sides of this conflict.
@maigari,
It is not about 'free elections', it is about in the last few years of
Hamas shooting rockets and firing mortars at Isreal. If it was our
country I would be the first in line to destroy the enemy who dared do
this. But liberals like you want to 'poo poo' the bad Isreali's because
they are sick of it. I hope they destroy Hamas and then go after
Hezbollah.
@mmmm,
Too true. time to get both sides of the story, not the
CBS/NBC/CNN/ABC/New York Times/Washington Post liberal biased smearing
of reporting. Too bad these institutions have become shadows of thier
own political schemes. Lowell Thomas, Ernie Pyle, Edward Murrow and the
other greats must be turning in thier graves. SHAME!! Just like the
reporting of the 30+ people killed at the U.N. school. What was glossed
over are the many witnesses that saw militants firing mortars by the
school. Figures that another great militant ploy. Kill the innocents.
Cowards!
GO ISREAL!!!!!!!!!
Was looking at some bumper stickers last night that I'd bought after 3/19/03. One said "We're making enemies faster than we can kill them". Seems apropos to what Israel is now doing in Gaza.
And stop spreading vicious propaganda - The Israeli children that have rocktes fired at them daily cry at nights and wet their beds too!!
Just to set the record straight:
In 1947 the UN decided that there should be 2 states on the land of
Israel - one for the jews, and one for the palestinian arabs, and
divided the teritory.
The jews agreed to this solution, the arabs did not. As soon as the
British left, the palestinians and Egypt Lebanon Syria Iraq and Jordan,
attacked(!) the Jews. Millions of Arabs against hundreds of thousands
Jews. In spite of being largly out-numbered, the Jews won - and the
palestinitans fled(!!!) from part of their villages. And that is Why
the palestinians don't have a state!! -It's their own fault!!!
Since then, for decades, on and off, they try to destroy Israel using
violence against it's civilians. What would any normal country do if
doezens of rockets were targeted on it's civillians daily?!
For years we've heard that the PLO was the cause of Israel's troubles. Now the PLO is moderate and it's Hamas that's the source of all evil. 10 years from now Israel will be facing an organization founded by a tramatized Gazan kid who will grow up believing Hamas didn't go far enough. And as always, America will be shocked by the response.
The fourth strongest army on earth have unleashed terror on Gazans simply because the Gazans have dared to elect Hamas in a free and fair elections! Someone should point uot to those oordering the killings and the executioners that force alone has never deterred a determined people from their aspirations to be free!
"They see Hamas' rockets but do not ask themselves why they are being shot."
WRONG! They are being shot for the same reasons The Egyptians, the
Saudis, the rest of the Arabs attack Israel...they hate anybody who is
not Moslem. This is about Religion. Israel would not have attacked were
it not for the missiles. Hamas are nothing but a bunch of cowardly
thugs hiding behind masks because they are gutless dogs who dare not
show their faces, and stashing missiles and weapons in schools and
mosques so they can whine to the world whenever some "civilian" gets
killed. Retaliation for these missiles isn't "agression".
I wonder whether an example would do.
Imagine an abusive relationship. A husband who habitually beats the wife. After sixty years of beating (one wonders how she still has the stamina) , the wife pick up a knife and stabs the husband.
We are now watching the husband's retaliation. He is after her blood now.
If we could ignore what happened before this stabbing, we would be right to condemn the wife. But, after knowing it, we cannot but ask ourselves why it took so long for her to fight back and why she wasn's better armed.
The media, particularly in the USA focuses its reporting only on this last event. They see Hamas' rockets but do not ask themselves why they are being shot. They show us only what Israel wants us to see, the wife stabbing the husband and not the decades of beating she has received.
Israel exists because it has been able to mobilize the great powers to its advantage, First, the UK, which after splitting the Ottoman Empire with France and keeping Palestine for itself, decided, with Lord Balfour in, I believe, 1916, to grant Jews a homeland in Palestine. Imagine the USA telling, for instance, the Armenians in 1915, that they could settle in, say, Nicaragua. What right did the UK have to give someone the land it did not possess?
And then, after the Holocaust, it played on the guilt feelings of European governments and on the power of the Jewish minority in the USA -- and still does both, quite successfully indeed. The recent book by Walt and Mersheimer describes the influence of the pro-Israeli lobby in the USA very forcefully.
Voters in the West must see through this ruse. Unless we do, we will not stop this war nor that many others that will follow, wars through which Israel will try and pursue its strategic aim of pushing Palestinians out of their (Palestinian) lands until none is left.
Sipping Pepsi and picking out the next settlement sites . . . . if Israel keeps up this pace it will run out of UN targets, schools and hospitals soon and may have to target a few of it's OWN to sorta even out the score and keep the "world (U,S.) press" placated . . . nice to see our tax dollars at work.