Damage Control

Rocket fire returned to Beersheba with a hail of missiles battering the desert city, causing death, injury and terror.

By YOCHEVED MIRIAM RUSSO
Beersheba terrorist attacks 521 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
Beersheba terrorist attacks 521
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
It’s an hour after Shabbat, a pleasantly warm day followed by a cool evening and a gentle breeze. I’m standing outside in the public courtyard near my apartment with Molly Goldberg, my mostly- Border collie, waiting for her to do her business. Bright street lamps offer plenty of light, dozens of friendly people are inside, within earshot, no one on the street seems threatening. In spite of all that, I’ve never felt more vulnerable in my life.
For the last three days, well over 100 rockets, mortars, Kassams, Grads and other missiles have pounded southern Israel again, with poor battered Beersheba serving as the target. For three days, 24 hours a day, we’ve lived with one ear cocked, waiting to hear “rocket incoming” warning sirens. City officials issue warnings again and again: “Stay inside.” Building walls offer some protection against shrapnel, even if they wouldn’t withstand a direct hit. But here I am anyway, outside. For those of us with pets, that’s part of the deal.
These days of bombardment have taken their toll, but for us in Beersheba this isn’t new. Even so, about an hour before, a just-after-Shabbat rocket barrage that hit Beersheba shifted my reality more than I care to admit. Within about a minute – a minute that lasted a lifetime – 11 Grad rockets either hit the ground and exploded or were taken out by the Iron Dome defense system.
Huddled inside, I heard Grads exploding on the right side of the building, then on the left. Two were exceptionally loud – both shook the bed where the dogs and I had taken refuge, all three of us shaking. This was new. Beersheba had never sustained this kind of Grad attack before.
Having lived through several weeks of rocket attacks prior to Operation Cast Lead in 2009, then again for several more days last February – not to mention all the time I’ve spent in Sderot during that beleaguered city’s darker days – I’ve learned to adopt at least some of the “this too shall pass” attitude most Israelis seem to affect. But this barrage changed things. This is the first time I literally ducked when one of the Grads smashed into the ground. To be completely honest, I didn’t just duck – I grabbed a pillow and pulled it over my head. It’s not that I expected the polyester fiberfill to protect me, but there’s something to be said about not being able to see the bogeyman, whatever form he might take.
The intensity and duration of this attack exceeded anything that occurred toward the end of 2008, when the bombardment went on for weeks. Then, the Grads were fired in ones and twos. The city sirens would wail, we’d wait, listen for one or two explosions, and know that was it – at least until the next time.
Last February was the same. The rocket fire came mostly in ones and twos – occasionally three. But this August, for the last three days, the common volley seems to be three or four Grads at a time – right up until Saturday night’s barrage when no fewer than 11 were fired.
Why does it make a difference? Think of it this way: You’re standing somewhere and someone fires a rifle in your general direction once or twice. That’s awful, no question about it. But chances are, by the time you’re fully cognizant of what happened, it’s over.
Now think of standing there while someone fires at you 11 times. Now you have plenty of time to wonder where the next one is heading. Lots of opportunity to consider “Will the next one have my name on it?”
Sad to say, but this time one of those Grads did bear someone’s name. Yossi Shoshan, a 38-year-old man from Ofakim, heard about the rocket attacks in Beersheba, became concerned about his nine-months pregnant wife and went to pick her up. He was killed when a Grad struck. That wasn’t all. A woman wounded in the barrage is still fighting for her life. Five others who were wounded will reportedly recover.
With all our experience, most of us in Beersheba have established attack rituals – places we go, things we do to protect ourselves and calm our nerves. Last February, there was a general outcry when people learned that public bomb shelters were being kept locked, inaccessible to people who didn’t have a specially built safe room in their homes, who wanted to run to a public shelter instead. At the time, Beersheba’s Mayor Rubik Danilovich and the Home Front Command stressed that the reason the shelters were locked was concern for public safety. As Amit Reingold, head of Beersheba’s Emergency Services Network, explained, the danger in having people leave their homes or apartments and run outside to a shelter is far greater than encouraging them to remain where they are, inside, even if they don’t have an actual reinforced room.
The wisdom of that decision became obvious again this August. During one Grad attack, seven people were wounded – not by the Grad itself but while trying to rush into an outdoor shelter. Now we understand: Stay inside, wherever you are. Don’t run outside. Even without a safe room, you’re safer inside.
I’m guessing, but I’d bet that only about 30 percent of Beersheba residents have actual reinforced safe rooms within their own homes or apartments. Public buildings have them, but in homes or apartments, most older buildings aren’t so equipped. It’s become one reason to change addresses.
Just a few weeks ago one of my friends bought a new apartment. Same neighborhood, but the new home has a reinforced safe room. “It was one of the reasons we decided to move,” he said. “We wanted protection for our two girls in case Beersheba was attacked again.” Their timing couldn’t have been better – they were fully moved in as of last week.
Some older apartment buildings do have common safe rooms for the tenants, usually on the ground floor. There’s one in my apartment building. I know where it is, but I’ve never been in it. Every time I’ve walked by it, there’s been a big padlock on the door. I don’t really care, and apparently no one else does, either. Once the sirens start blaring, I’ve never heard anyone else run down the stairs to reach the official mamad, safe room. But then, my neighbors haven’t adopted the custom of running into the stairwells, either. The stairwells are thought to be safer from rocket fire – no windows, plus all the protection of the concrete stairs, if you get under them. In this building, we all seem to stay put.
Everybody prepares. Some families have stocked up on things like videos and jigsaw puzzles, keeping them in the safe room to keep kids occupied during the tense times. Others equip the room with bunk beds so the kids sleep in the safe room, which avoids having to wake them up if the sirens sound at night.
For those of us without a mamad, we’ve picked some other room to run to, usually the one with the fewest windows. At my house, we established a routine during the 2008 blitz. Back then, I was living with my two dogs in a house in the Old City that had a very large walled yard. The problem was, once the sirens started up, Rachel, my mostly-poodle, would run outside to bark, apparently believing part of her dog duties included protecting us from annoying sounds. That was a problem. I didn’t want Rachel outside, and I surely didn’t want to run out to drag her back in.
During that several-week onslaught, I worked to get the roommates trained. Pavlov would be impressed. The minute the sirens started, I’d bring both of them into the kitchen – in that house, the kitchen was the safest place – and give them each a treat. To this day, when the dogs hear the siren, they run to the kitchen – a different kitchen, but they know they’ll get a treat. Then we all head for the bedroom, which in this apartment seems the safest place to ride out the blasts.
It depends on where you are and what you’re doing, but the 15-second window the sirens allow is plenty if you’re already at home. Sometimes it seems like too much time: the sirens have blasted, they turn off, and then the world comes to a complete halt. There’s total silence, almost as if the whole city is collectively holding its breath. You wait… and wait… and then finally the blasts start – one, two, three explosions or more, some in clusters, some single. With each one, you’re wondering, “Where? Where did it hit? Is that all? Is it over? Will there be more?”
Sometimes there’s a very long pause – almost a minute, even – between what you thought was the last hit, until another one comes. People have lost their lives over that, thinking the attack was over when it really wasn’t. We’re supposed to wait 10 minutes after the last explosion to come out, but 10 minutes is a very long time. I suspect most of us cut it short.
How do the explosions sound? It depends on what they hit, but it’s always a large WHOMP! Very loud, very powerful. What’s funny is, once you’ve had some experience, you become able to identify the various types of rockets by sound. It’s very easy to distinguish between the Kassams that became so familiar during the siege of Sderot, as compared to the Grad missiles that reach Beersheba. The less powerful – but not necessarily less deadly – Kassams can’t reach Beersheba, but Grads can. If you’re ever unlucky enough to be able to compare the two, the Grads sound far more ominous.
This time, during our post-Shabbat “11-Grad salute,” two of the blasts were powerful enough to shake the bed where we were sitting, which was a first. When I felt the bed jump, I knew one or more had hit close to home. How close? That’s the problem. You never know.
Assuming the hit wasn’t within your range of vision, it might be quite a long time before you find out where it actually struck. There’s one rule everyone here obeys, a modern-day corollary of the “loose lips sink ships” mantra imposed during the two world wars. Home Front Command instructs us never to post online – in any location – where exactly any rocket hit. The theory is that our enemies may be monitoring the Internet, see where their missiles hit, where they missed, and thereby perfect their aim. It seems like an excess of caution. Our local English-language e-mail list has about 1,100 members, and we know exactly who’s on it. A terrorist lurking there would be ferreted out pretty quickly. Even so, it’s very rare for someone to break ranks and post anything specific about where exactly a rocket landed. And if someone did, he’s instantly be taken to task by a long list of other members.
To counter the e-mail blackout, an informal sort of telephone tree evolved, checking to see who’s okay and if anyone knows where the rockets hit. Any information gathered is passed along by phone. That said, this August was tough on the information game. Too many friends are away on vacation, so our neighborhood resources weren’t complete. But Israel is a small country. This time, I learned the general location of the rocket strike that killed Yossi Shoshan because a friend in Jerusalem knew someone who lived in that neighborhood, had happened to call, and then passed the information on.
Iron Dome, new to us during this season of attacks, adds another dimension. Experts can explain why the Iron Dome – the amazing shoot-the-rockets-outof- the-sky-before-they-hit technology – sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. But when Iron Dome works, it changes the sound sequence. First we get the siren, then the silence. But then Iron Dome adds something else – the sound of a jet plane taking off.
Only then do you hear the hit – which may be the Iron Dome, or it might be a rocket strike. Either way, you get a big WHOMP.
I still can’t distinguish between a rocket hitting the ground or being blown out of the sky by Iron Dome – they sound alike to me. But during multiple-rocket barrages, it gets complicated. You’ll hear some rockets hit and explode, plus you hear the jet sounds of Iron Dome, and presumably an Iron Dome hit or two. But even that’s not all. Following all that, you hear any number of car alarms going off. The vibrations from any close hits are enough to set off car alarms, too, adding to the general chaos.
Finally, of course, you hear the other sirens – the police, the ambulances, all the emergency vehicles. If you can figure out where they’re heading, you might learn where the rocket hit.
Living in a war zone offers endless opportunities for “only in Israel” tales. I was astonished by a game some sixto 10-year-olds were playing outside, turning the traditional hide-and-seek into something uniquely their own.
Instead of having one child cover his eyes and count to 20 while the others run and hide, here in Beersheba the child would make siren sounds instead of counting. After he stopped, he’d run to find the others. Only in Israel – where we understand having 15 seconds to hide.
Unfortunately, war brings out culture clashes, too, especially the cultural divide between Israel’s Center and the South. A common perception in the South is that the seemingly endless series of rocket attacks on civilian populations down here will never be solved until a rocket or two hits Tel Aviv. Right or wrong, the feeling is that the Center just doesn’t get it, doesn’t understand what it’s like to live under fire.
Worse, there are those who suppose they do get it but just don’t care. That’s not universally true, we all know that. Every one of us has friends in the Center who not only care but open their homes to us when we need a break. Other times, however, we see our situation being treated with such disdain, we feel isolated.
The media – originating in the Center – are one example. The way the media uniformly report on rocket attacks is enough to drive any southerner crazy.
I sometimes think the news organizations have developed a macro: The moment some reporter – working deep in the bowels of a building in the Center – keys in the words “Rocket strike in Beersheba,” an additional phrase, “No damage,” is automatically programmed to follow.
During the first days of this most recent barrage, the pattern was nothing short of awesome. The siren would sound, the rockets would hit. I’d run to the computer to see if there was any information. Literally within two or three minutes – my head would still be ringing and I’m sure the smoke still hadn’t cleared – there would be the breaking news: “Rocket hits Beersheba. No damage.”
Why this incessant rush to judgment? Why this imperious pronouncement “No damage” over and over? For the most part, no one could know at that time what kind of “damage” might have occurred. Several times – to their ultimate embarrassment – the media had to eat those words.
One of the “No damage” pronouncements on Friday was followed, a short while later, with the news that eight people had been taken to the hospital. Yet virtually every time, every day, rockets struck, the immediate knee-jerk reaction was to report “no damage.” After a while, it starts to feel like a de mimimis dismissal: “Okay, a rocket hit, but it’s nothing! Not important. There was no damage.” In other words, Don’t make a fuss. There wasn’t any damage. What’s the big deal?
Worst of all, these “no damage” pronouncements fail to acknowledge all the different kinds of damage. Physical injury is one, destruction of property another. But there’s also the kind of damage that eats at your soul, that robs you of peace, that results from living, for days and weeks at a time, under constant threat of being blown to kingdom come. The tension wears holes in your mind. It takes a toll, day by day, hour by hour.
One incident will live in my mind forever. I’d been volunteering in Sderot at a food warehouse, organizing boxes of donated foodstuffs for needy families. The local economy in Sderot, under siege for over eight years, was bankrupt. People were out of work, and families were literally hungry. One hot summer afternoon a lady of a certain age walked into the food warehouse, an odd occasion in itself. With Kassams pounding the city night and day, being out on the streets was incredibly dangerous. For her to walk all the way from her home was nothing short of foolhardy, yet there she was.
We found her a chair, sat her down, gave her a cup of water. She took a sip, then put her face in her hands and began to cry, sobbing as though her heart would break. She cried and cried, a bottomless pit of despair. Nothing helped. “Who is she?” I finally asked the director. “Is something seriously wrong?”
“Probably not,” he said.
She was a widow but wasn’t in serious need, although we packed a generous box for her anyway. She was probably just worn out with tension, he said. Having lived for so long through fear, loneliness and the seeming hopelessness of the situation, she had just reached her limit. She couldn’t take any more. Was it dangerous to walk to the warehouse? Certainly. But to her, staying in her home, suffering alone, was worse.
These stories are not uncommon. We see manifestations of the unmitigated tension here, too. Tempers flare, families argue, kids get upset, adults burst into tears for seemingly no reason. As the bombardment continues, it all intensifies. Everybody gets a little cranky, and nothing makes us crankier than to see news reports from all over Israel – or worse yet, from abroad – who automatically chirp “no damage” following any rocket strike.
To those of us in the South, every rocket strike causes damage. It may not cause physical harm to anyone, it may not rip apart a car or a building, but it damages the soul of every person within range. Every one of us has our individual limit of how much 24/7 tension we can tolerate.
Some are stronger than others, but incrementally, we all suffer. A recent study of Sderot children shows that between 70% and 94% suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. Those were kids who were never physically hurt but lived under rocket fire for an extended time. They were damaged. Every rocket results in some kind of damage, something we think our countrymen in the Center don’t always realize.
Of course, we love passing on all the miracle stories, too: The yeshiva where a minyan was praying but when the Grad hit, it just landed; it didn’t explode. Then there was another school building that was hit, but no one was inside. And the Beersheba man who’d suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized, so no one was home when a Grad scored a direct hit on his house. Even his son escaped – he’d gone out for a pizza a few minutes before. Or the Kassam that hit a family yard in Sderot. It hit the yard, but in doing so it struck a garden hose. The hose sprayed water all over the place and put the fire out all by itself.
Then, too, we see how all the time a rocket will hit directly between two homes. If it had hit a meter or two to either side, many people might have lost their lives.
In the years to come when we tell tales about the bombardment of Beersheba, maybe these good stories are the ones we’ll remember. I hope the memory of feeling afraid while standing out in the courtyard with the dog will be lost in the sands of time.