HOD HASHARON — “If you think you hear the sirens, then you didn’t hear the sirens,” my teacher and director of campus Aubrey Isaacs said on our first day in Israel.
Let me tell you, since Nov. 14, we definitely heard it and more than once.
On that day, the leader of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza, Ahmed Jabari, was killed in an Israeli air force strike in Gaza City. In retaliation of his death, Hamas, over a span of two days, fired around 250 rockets according to ynetnews.com.
Unfortunately for my classmates and I living a mere 40 kilometers from Gaza, we had to go through the process of hearing the siren and running to a shelter three times.
One of those three times we had to exit a bus right before it was to transport us north to safer regions of Israel.
Usually, Hamas gets trigger-happy every couple months and decides to shoot kassam rockets into the area around Gaza, aimed mostly at the city of Ashkelon. It sounds scary but these kasam rockets are pipes filled with nails and a couple of other ingredients that are meant to cause more damage with debris than actually hitting something.
More often than not, since Hamas has atrocious accuracy, the rockets miss their target entirely and land in an unoccupied field. The bigger “explosion” is a diplomatic one as Israel and Hamas have a small standoff followed by a cease-fire between the two areas negotiated by Egypt because Hamas refuses to talk to Israel directly.
After the cease-fire, everything is fine for a couple months.
The way it works in Israel and Gaza is that one shoots and the other shoots back depending on the severity of the first shooting. The usual cycle started in early November but escalated while my group was in Poland. Once Israel decided to take out and did take out Jabari, Hamas responded with a huge barrage of missile into the Negev region of Israel where I live.
On Nov. 15, my group was on a field trip to the beach and Jerusalem to learn about pre-state Israel. The day ended with us having free time in an open mall in Jerusalem called Ben Yehuda Street until 6:30 p.m. when we were to be back on the bus. When we got on the bus, we were told that we would not be able to go back to our campus in Beer Sheva but would instead have to relocate to another High School Israel campus just north of Tel Aviv. None of us had any clothes or toiletries, so our counselor called our campus director who approved for us to quickly drive down south and gather our things.
When we arrived at campus, we hurried to start packing, but first we had to attend a meeting about the current situation in our bomb shelter. While we were having our meeting, the missile siren went off twice.
After the meeting, in which we were told how we had to evacuate the campus because the security minister of Israel ordered our school closed. We packed our things and hopped on the bus, only to be greeted with yet another siren. We ran to the bomb shelter because from the time the siren starts, you have 45 second to find shelter before it hits. As we were running, I looked up and saw a rocket streaming across the sky. Fortunately, this wasn’t the kassam rocket but the Iron Dome missile going to intercept the kassam rocket.
Iron Dome was set up by Israel in order to detect the path of rockets from Gaza, set off the siren the in area Iron Dome thinks the rocket will land, and in the case of it having a chance of hitting a populated area, Iron Dome will send an anti-rocket to blow up the kassam rocket.
After we climbed onto the bus a second time, this time getting out of rocket range without a siren, we drove to the other High School Israel campus in Hod Hasharon, a city north of Tel Aviv, where we are currently staying until the situation cools down.
We thought we would only have to spend a couple days in Hod Hasharon, but the situation got constantly worse. On Nov. 15, Hamas fired a huge amount of rockets into Israel, to which the Israeli Defense Force sent air strikes into Gaza. Ashkelon was nearly constantly being hit, but the scary part of that day was that sirens in Tel Aviv went off.
Let me put this into perspective. The last time Tel Aviv was under the threat of getting hit by rockets was during the Gulf War in 1991. In addition, Egypt sent forces into the Sinai Peninsuala, a dangerous place along the Israel-Egypt border, and Israel moved ground forces closer to Gaza and called in 30,000 reserves.
Based on these indicators, I fear I won’t be back at home in my dorm room in Beer Sheva for a while.
“None of us wanted something like this to happen, and in the beginning it looked like everything would be OK,” said Sam Brunswick, one of my classmates from New York. “We are all hoping things die down and there is peace and no more escalation for everyone’s sake.”
