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Rockets return to Sderot

A heartbreaking piece from the Christian Science Monitor describing daily life in the embattled Israeli town of Sderot:

The very hour Chana Melul returned to Sderot with her three young boys, whom she'd taken on vacation up north to escape the front lines, the rockets were back.

Minutes after they set down their suitcases, a Qassam rocket launched from nearby Gaza landed about 50 yards from their apartment building. It crashed into a storage shed and blew apart the sidewalk that leads to the community center around the corner. The center includes a rocket-resistant theater, recently built to give kids and grownups living here a little stress-free entertainment.

But for Ms. Melul, a single mother, the disquiet never really goes away.

"It's always right here," she says, pointing to her head.

Rocket barrages pound south

Yet another salvo in Hamas' ongoing campaign of terror against Israelis living near Gaza:

A 59-year-old Israeli woman was lightly-to-moderately wounded in the Yad Mordechai area on Thursday afternoon as Palestinian terror groups launched a barrage of mortar shells and Qassam rockets against Israeli communities near the Gaza border.

Rocket barrage strikes Negev

How long can Israel restrain itself in the face of attacks like this:

On Friday afternoon, a Kassam rocket landed near Sderot's Sapir College, damaging six cars. A second rocket landed in the town, one hit an open area and a fourth apparently landed in the Eshkol region, although it was yet to be found. Hamas claimed responsibility for the rocket fire.

Earlier, nine mortar shells slammed into the western Negev, one damaging a building near a kibbutz in the Sderot area. No one was wounded in the attacks.

Kassam wounds 5 in western Negev

The rocket fire in southern Israel continues:

With truce talks on hold – rocket terror continues. Five people sustained shrapnel wounds after a rocket crashed into a community in the Eshkol Regional Council on Tuesday afternoon. Emergency medical teams evacuated those wounded to the Soroka Hospital in Beersheba for treatment.

The rocket landed outside a packing factory in the community, near the residence quarters of the foreign laborers employed there. A Thai worker was lightly-to-moderately wounded and four others, one of them an Israeli, were lightly wounded

Sderot resident: Carter "bored, looking for something to do"

On Tuesday, Jimmy Carter visited the embattled Israeli town of Sderot. One might guess that the former U.S. President known for his harshly anti-Israel stance was attempting to show his "evenhandedness." But Sderot residents seemed unimpressed:

"Today Carter comes to visit the city that Hamas terrorizes with rockets and later he will speak to the Hamas leaders who advocate this rocket fire," said one Sderot onlooker as Carter arrived with his security personnel into the city. "His visit to Sderot doesn't make any sense."

In fact, many of the residents in Sderot felt that the entire Carter visit was a joke on the residents.

"He looks like an old politician who is bored, looking for something to do," says Hamutal Ben-Shitrit, a local Sderot photographer who photographed Carter's visit at the Sderot Police Station, where the former US president viewed the hundreds of Kassams rockets stored away.

Voices from Sderot

The Britain Israel Communications and Research Center has put together these four videos of Sderot residents telling their heart-wrenching stories of what life is like on the front lines. Take a look.

Up close and personal with a Kassam

This video gives you just a glimpse of what it's like to have your life disrupted by rocket fire. As the blogger comments, "It's no way to live."

Terrorists up the ante

About 50 terrorist rockets were fired yesterday from Gaza at Sderot and surrounding areas, as well as at Ashkelon, a larger city that lies farther from Gaza than Sderot. Clearly, this signals the terrorists' intention of extending their reach to cause as much pain to as many Israelis as possible. The assault continues today.

This sad picture says it all.

Heavy rocket barrage strikes Sderot

Today, yet another terrorist rocket barrage struck in and near the beleaguered Israeli town of Sderot. As of now, one Israeli has been killed in the attack, and several more are injured. The siege of Sderot continues, and shows little sign of abating.

In the past couple of days, two notable pieces have done a good job of examining the plight of Sderot from both a human and political perspective. First, Sderot's war children:

Just like any other 10-year-old boy who wants his mother at his side during tough times, he asked where she was, but realized that at that moment mom is not around. And Yossi, despite the Qassam shrapnel that was lodged in his shoulder, the blood around him, and the incredible pain, maintained incomprehensible restraint. He merely muttered that his shoulder hurts, and his little sister, just like a kind nurse, kept on caressing him.

Then, here's Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal:

It is no stretch to say that life in Sderot has become unendurable. Palestinians and their chorus of supporters -- including the 118 countries of the so-called Non-Aligned Movement, much of Europe, and the panoply of international aid organizations from the World Bank to the United Nations -- typically reply that life in the Gaza Strip is also unendurable, and that Palestinian casualties greatly exceed Israeli ones. But this argument is fatuous: Conditions in Gaza, in so far as they are shaped by Israel, are a function of conditions in Sderot. No Palestinian Kassams (or other forms of terrorism), no Israeli "siege."

Please continue your prayers for the people of Sderot as they attempt to endure the unendurable.

Tel Avivans show solidarity with Sderot

Amid all the bad news coming out of Sderot, there are uplifting stories like this -- 200 residents of Tel Aviv took a trip to Sderot to do their shopping for Shabbat, providing a much-needed economic shot in the arm to the beleaguered city. One of the organizers of the shopping trip explains:

"We felt the need to do something to help the economic activity in [Sderot], even a little bit, and to strengthen them. We began promoting this through word to mouth and the response was amazing."

And what do the business owners have to say? Yehuda Cohen, the owner of a small supermarket in Sderot, said that "what happened here today was a miracle. I haven’t seen so many customers here in over a year.

"This is heartwarming and so exciting. I know that thanks to these good people I will be able to provide for myself for this month at least, pay the salaries of my two employees and even pay the electricity bill. There are good people in this nation. I ma so happy they came here. It's almost a miracle for me."