report
The rocket alarm is currently ringing out again and again in the Israeli border area with the Gaza Strip. There is a mixture of fear and frustration among the residents.
To experience what war feels like, all you have to do is get out of the car in Ashkelon. The city is less than 10 kilometers north of the Gaza Strip. This means that if there is a rocket alarm and firing from the Gaza Strip again, you only have a few seconds to get to safety.
The small concrete shelter is full of people, many of them have fear written on their faces. The pressure wave from the rocket impact, less than 200 meters from here, goes through your bones.
Back outside, you can see shattered windows everywhere. And several houses that have taken hits in the last few days. This time the rocket hit a square. Luckily there were no injuries.
Bunker was the best investment
Yehuda stands there and looks distraught. There has also been a hit right next to his apartment. Just a month ago he moved to Ashkelon, on the border with the Gaza Strip. He needed a cheaper apartment. But now he wants to leave as soon as possible.
He lives alone here, says Jehuda, who is originally from Tel Aviv. “I live here now, but I want to leave. I want to go back to Tel Aviv with everything that’s happening here. I’m not used to the rockets. I’m scared.” Two days ago, he says, all the glass in his house shattered. It didn’t hurt him, but the glass was scattered on the floor. “I haven’t slept since Saturday because I’m afraid something could happen to me.”
Miriam lives right next to where the rocket hit. Now she stands in front of the house with her family, in the middle of the war. The bunker they built was the best investment, says the teacher: “Of course we have a shelter. We run there. But the shelter is also shaking. It’s completely crazy. We can’t move, we can’t leave and “We don’t even see anyone. We don’t see our granddaughter because we can’t visit her. We live in fear. We’re always wondering when the next round of rockets will come.”
Even at the school where she works, everyone is always busy doing exercises with the children so that they can get into the bunker as quickly as possible. “This is not a normal reality,” says Miriam.
“The world must see what has been done to us”
And then we meet Gabriel – he doesn’t have electricity at home, so he wants to buy candles. He talks to his wife on the phone again and again – they have six children. He really wants to show us terrible videos that are supposed to show the terror of the Hamas fighters. You can see a captured Israeli military post. Dead, bloody soldiers lie everywhere. Some of the bodies are trampled on.
I can not sleep anymore. I have to show the videos to the whole world so that the world can see what was done to us, the people of Israel. The world needs to know the truth, needs to know what happened. Almost 1,000 dead and 3,000 injured.
You simply can’t sleep with these rockets. “You could hear the detonation earlier, right?” asks Gabriel. “On Saturday it was like that every two minutes for four hours. Even the big kids were shitting their pants out of fear.”
It will not be the only missile alarm. We have to go to the bunker again. And what you keep hearing about are the bombing raids in the Gaza Strip. Fighter planes are constantly in the air and you can hear heavy explosions again and again. On both sides of the Gaza border, people are afraid of the next attacks. A region is at war.