Flemish Benjamin Bollen testifies from Israel: “This time it is very serious, a reality check of where you actually live. The images are terrible” | Israel-Palestine conflict

Bollen testifies from his parents-in-law’s apartment, where he and his family have moved in for the time being. “Our house doesn’t have a fallout shelter, but this building does,” he says. “We are going to live here for the time being and see how the situation develops.” According to information Bollen has through friends and the government, civilians have been kidnapped and held hostage in the south of the Gaza border and taken to the Gaza Strip. “There would have been an infiltration of about 50 terrorists from Gaza with jeeps,” he added. “This morning I received reports from friends that they were driving through the streets in Ashdod, a city in the south, shooting. There was also an attack on a military base in the south.”

The Flemish notices on site that the streets are empty, while the police are driving around en masse. “We received a message from the mayor via WhatsApp that the public shelters are open again,” he says. “You learn to live with that, but this time it is apparently a different kind of situation than we are used to. They regularly shoot rockets or there are individual attacks by one or two people, a knife attack or a shooting incident in Tel Aviv, but that is isolated. Now apparently it is a well-organized attack that they have launched.” Moreover, one of the reasons why Bollen returned from the border with Lebanon this morning is “that people fear that Hezbollah is also planning something from the north.”

Our compatriot is holding strong, but is clearly having a hard time. “I have seen images of the major closure of the Gaza Strip, of which apparently a very large part has been opened up with a bulldozer. They have attacked military bases. I have seen images of Israeli soldiers being lynched and murdered and they are said to have kidnapped civilians and taken them to the Gaza Strip. We already have those situations… I don’t know when that happened last time. The images you see are terrible.”

Bollen also understands that it is serious from the fact that two of his friends have been called up with immediate effect, which is not usual. “You can enroll yourself as a reservist in the army after you have done your normal army service and then you are called up – once a year, for a week or a month, it shows. But with immediate effect, that is only for a very serious situation.” Bollen encountered many soldiers on the way to his parents-in-law. “All military units are being mobilized.”

The news of the “military operation” by the Islamist organization Hamas this morning took everyone in Israel by surprise. “The surprise is total, total,” says Bollen. “Every so often you get a reality check here about where you actually live. Normal life is normal life here, but when something like this happens, you realize where you live and that it is not all obvious.”

This is also evident from how the government constantly keeps citizens informed in Israel. “Many people here have an application on their phone so that in the event of an air raid siren you know how many minutes or seconds you have to go to the nearest air raid shelter. I think everyone here has that on their phone by default. If there are infiltrations by terrorists, you will also be told about this through this channel from the government itself. You will then receive messages from the mayor via WhatsApp and Facebook. You will be constantly updated here. You can’t turn on the television or radio here without being confronted with it, because the programs are interrupted before every air raid.”