"Am I therefore become your enemy,because I TELL YOU THE TRUTH...?"
(Galatians 4:16)

A Day in the Life of a Gaza-Belt Israeli Community

Early this week Netiv Ha’asara was in the news again—just barely, a passing mention—when a mortar shell fired from Gaza lightly damaged a house there. Netiv Ha’asara, a moshav (cooperative farming community) of 550 people, is the closest Israeli community to Gaza, a scant 100 meters from the northern border of the Strip. It was formerly one of the Sinai settlements and was reestablished at its current location in 1982 after those were torn down at the behest of Israel’s then peace partner, Egypt.Netiv Ha’asara also flickered briefly into the news on January 4 when it was hit by eight mortars from Gaza that caused no injuries or damage. If any of the Israeli Gaza-belt communities has a substantial news presence it’s the much larger Sderot, the battered town of twenty thousand to Netiv Ha’asara’s south and west.Netiv Ha’asara, though, is a microcosm of a nightmarish reality and an almost incomprehensible story of perseverance.Before Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in August and September 2005, Netiv Ha’asara was subjected to a lower frequency of fire from the Strip, though on June 19, 2003, at 1:30 a.m., a Qassam rocket hit and extensively damaged a house there. It was reported that "Residents of the moshav ran outside, thinking that the missile had struck nearby, and then saw smoke coming from [the] home, where the missile had landed near a bedroom.”July 2005, the month before the disengagement, was marked by the Gaza terrorists with massive barrages, and in one of them Netiv Ha’asara suffered its only fatality so far. On the evening of July 14 Dana Gelkowitz, a 22-year-old woman from a nearby kibbutz who was visiting her boyfriend in Netiv Ha’asara, was killed in a direct hit by a Qassam as she and the boyfriend, Amir Rogolsky, who took a shrapnel wound, sat on the porch of his home.On October 2, 2005, Haaretz reported on “complaints voiced this week by the residents of Netiv Ha’asara…that they have been ‘abandoned’ to Gaza Strip terrorism”—complaints that weren’t heard and still haven’t been. On October 26 a Qassam hit the community’s soccer field without causing injuries.This may already seem like a lot for a community of 550, but it was still only the beginning. Just a few days later on November 2, Qassams hitting Netiv Ha’asara knocked out the community’s power and injured five people. Or as Human Rights Watch reported on one of the houses that were hit:Eshel Margalit said that the Red Dawn warning [system] sounded at 6:45 p.m., indicating a rocket launching. His daughter was upstairs in the family study working on the computer. “I yelled to her but she was not eager to leave the computer, she was 18, you know,” Margalit said. “She came down and we were running to the secure room when the Qassam hit the house.” The rocket penetrated the roof and exploded in the study. “We went up, opened the door, and saw the room was destroyed. When my daughter realized what could have happened she burst into tears and it took a week to get over the trauma,” Margalit said. The strike damaged the roof and walls and destroyed the solar water heater...
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As in the days of Noah....