After three weeks stuck at home, glued to the television and sleeping in the small safe room that the newest homes in Ashkelon, Shimon Pur has finally decided to return to work. But he has done it almost on tiptoe, without leaving behind the anxiety that comes from heaven. A walk from the clinic where he works as a security guard there is a building with a hole in the facade, a burned car and a smashed storefront. Only businesses that lend essential services they are still open. AND thousands of people have been evacuated, leaving one of the oldest cities in the world half empty, despite the concrete forests that outline its horizon. “I’m used to hearing missiles of the Iron Dome since I was little, but we had never had these kinds of explosions. “He is terrifying,” confesses this Jewish twenty-something.
The Iron Dome is the anti-missile system that protects the southern Israel, but he is far from invincible. Since this last war was launched with the Hamas atrocities in the Israeli communities of the Gaza peripheryan attack in which more than 1,300 peopleMost of them civilians, hundreds of projectiles have evaded the shield. Ashkelon has been the most bombed city, a dubious honor to which she is nevertheless accustomed. Of the thousand rockets launched on the city, 340 fell in open spaces and 180 made a direct impact, according to municipal sources. These rockets have less explosive charge than a missile, but their rudimentary technology makes them absolutely indiscriminate. Four people have died in the city and dozens have been injured.
Many of its inhabitants feel abandoned. The hundreds of millions of shekels promised by the previous Government to build more rpublic effusions and provide all homes with safe rooms, as the rooms reinforced with concrete and metal doors that have been mandatory since 1993 are known, have not arrived. Nearly 40,000 peoplealmost a third of the population, lack them and many are furious with the Executive of Binyamin Netanyahu. “No one understands what’s going on here! More than 160 apartments They have received direct impacts and they keep shooting at us. “I want security, not dead,” the mayor of the city protested a few days ago, Tomer GlamNetanyahu’s co-religionist.
“New Holocaust”
“The Government is not helping. “I have three children and they haven’t been able to go outside for three weeks,” says Hanan, a 42-year-old truck driver. This Sunday morning there have been no alerts and more and more people are taking to the streets, but in the background the explosions of the israeli attacks in Gaza, located just six kilometers away. It is as if the earth regurgitated sinister arches to constantly remind the population of the war that does not cease. “For us, the Hamas attack was a new holocaust“I want the people of Gaza to pay,” says Hanan, expressing the general feeling of revengethat has been imposed after the initial shock of the attack. Those who must be joined collective trauma and the revived inherent vulnerability of the Jewish people. “I don’t want peace, I want Gaza be razed. I don’t care that many children are dying. “If you kill my children, I will kill yours,” Hanan adds without a hint of irony.
Leaving Ashkelon in the direction of the towns bordering the northwest of Gaza, where the Israeli army prevents access to the press, there is burned fields due to the impact of the rockets. military trucks and jeeps with soldiers dressed for combat They travel on the roads. A group of talmudic students He has stopped on the shoulder to listen to the bombings on Gaza. Black columns of smoke burst onto the horizon. The ground raid of Israeli troops is still marching. The artillery does not rest. Drones, helicopters and fighters whistle from time to time. It is not easy to move because there are many roads closed to leave them to the military.
Despair in Gaza
Related news
Despair in the Strip has reached new heights. During the day, thousands of people bravely broke into four UNRWA warehouses to take sacks of flour, wheat and hygiene products. “It is a worrying sign that the civil order “has begun to crack,” said the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, some of them originating from the same Ashkelon that demands their punishment. Not everyone expresses themselves in the terms of Hanán or Yossi Brook, a volunteer from Chabad —a Hasidic current– that distributes food among the very few inhabitants that remain in Sderot. Just 5% of its 35,000 souls. In the south alone, 25 towns have been partially or completely evacuated. “One has to erase Gaza from the face of the earth. “They don’t deserve to live,” says Yossi among ghostly streets tattooed with the wounds of the battle that was fought here against the hooded Hamas men who ended up entrenched in the police station until it was blown up with them inside.
Other Israelis say they feel empathy for the civilians of the Stripbut they have bought into the official narrative that turns all civilians in Gaza into human shields and collateral victims. “It is very complicated to operate in such a densely populated area, but if there is terrorist activity “We have to act and it is very difficult to do so without casualties,” says Vlad Rzheutski, a 28-year-old physiotherapist. The only good thing that in his opinion this war has brought is the temporary pacification of Israeli society. “It has brought us together again, everyone is now trying to help each other,” says Rzheutski.