Lapid: Sympathy does not stop Grad rockets

“Sympathy does not stop Grad rockets,” said Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid on Tuesday during a tour of rocket-weary Sderot, as part of a review of the situation and a speech about investing in the peripheral regions.

Lapid said that the government has forgotten Sderot and other communities, including larger cities like Beersheba, and failed to defend them.

He slammed the government for only remembering the periphery every few years during election season.

During his tour, the Yesh Atid party leader visited the Sadadi family, whose house was hit by a Kassam rocket.

Following that visit, Lapid held a press conference at Casablan Palaces, accompanied by several of his party list’s top candidates for Knesset, including Petah Tikva Yeshivot head Rabbi Shai Piron, Dimona Mayor Meir Cohen and former Jerusalem police chief Miki Levy.

Levy appeared to call for harsher and direct military retaliation against Hamas.

Neither Levy nor Lapid specified exactly what tactic the military should employ, but many public officials have recently called for a return to targeted killing of Hamas leaders.

Piron said that Yesh Atid would commit to specific minimum funding quotas for education in the periphery to ensure that a child in Sderot would have the same education as a child in Ra’anana.

Lapid, for the first time, introduced another top candidate on his list, Maj.

Shimon Solomon (res.), a former paratrooper who has been an activist on multiple fronts relating to Ethiopian and African migrant issues, including being stationed as the Foreign Ministry’s aliya representative in Ethiopia.

He made aliya from Ethiopia in 1980 at the age of 12.

Meanwhile, Lapid sent an email to supporters and the media defending his picks for the top 15 spots on his Knesset slate.

The email slammed what it called old faces of the past in politics and proclaimed that Yesh Atid is proud that it has some new and less well-known faces, since it is positioning itself as the party of the future.

The email essentially confirmed the list which media reports have been carrying over the last few weeks, minus some small changes, such as former Health Ministry director-general Eitan Hai-Am’s quitting the party list.

The email also reaffirmed Levy’s remaining on the list, after days of rumors predicting that he would follow Hai-Am and drop out in frustration for being left out of the top 10 spots on the list.