Rockets reaching further.

One of the first news reports for today was that a house was hit in a place called Gedera. People there thought that they were out of reach. Again, as by a miracle, nobody got killed but a one year old baby got minor wounds .
Gedera is a little north- east from us.
We were actually expecting this to happen as a representative from Hamas was on TV yesterday saying that Hamas have rockets that can reach much further and that they will be “introduced to us shortly”.

The reactions from the world to what is going on remind me of a Dry Bones comic strip. It shows two people sitting in a boat with sharks all around them:
A:"Yikes. We're surrounded by sharks in a feeding frenzy. "
B:"So let's give them a leg to eat that might satisfy them."
A:"Where did you get a whacko idea like that ?"
B:"The Bill Clinton Manual for Jewish survival."
( You can look it up at http://www.drybones.org.il/ go to ...Cartoon Gallery and look up Dec.28.2000)

During the years 1978 and 1979 the Camp David agreement was worked out and signed. It resulted in all the Jewish settlements in the Sinai to be evacuated and destroyed.
It was in this period that the Israeli government encouraged Jews to move and settle in the Gaza Strip. It has been Israeli politics to settle Jews in areas with many Arabs in order to “soften up” the relationship between the two groups. Many of the Jews which were evacuated from the Sinai resettled in the Gaza Strip back then.
I know some of these people and know that it was not hatred towards Arabs that brought them to Gaza. Jews back in those days would do their shopping in Arab towns, would receive dental treatment at clinics run by Arabs and would often work side by side with Arabs.
In 2005 the Israeli government decided to evacuate all the Jews from Gaza in order to achieve peace. The situation had been growing “sour” since the Intifadas from 1987 and 2000 and moving the Jews out was seen as a solution to the problem in this area. 21 legal settlements and something like 2000 houses were destroyed as 8000 Jews lost their homes. 3000 Arabs who had been working in Jewish owned hothouses lost their jobs and income.
I heard no people having a problem with this out there……People didn’t even see anything extraordinary about it.(…. although no other government have ever done anything similar to what the Israeli government did….)
Since 2005 the rockets fired from Gaza at Israel became more frequent and also more sophisticated.
We cannot say that Israel’s efforts have been “blessed with peace”.

I am not smart enough to understand why Israel should have to accept a situation like this as I know for sure that no other country on earth would have reacted differently. The only difference is that they would have started a military operation much earlier.

We hear about the losses and our hearts are crying ….but there is no other alternative.
It is amazing how Hamas manages to do all their dirty works from the very center of civilian population.
So can I see no mistakes done by the Israelis ? Oh yes I do, and they make me cry…, but to start this military operation and to continue it is not to be counted among them.

Elin Elkouby