The Press in the Middle East | “It was terrifying”

In the aftermath of one of the worst attacks in the country’s history, Israel is licking its wounds in a climate of psychosis. IDF soldiers mass at the Gaza border and await the order to attack.

(Sderot and Ofakim) A metallic voice fills the sky in the Israeli town of Sderot, located less than two kilometers from the Gaza Strip. “To the shelters, to the shelters!” », begs the alarm. On Abragil Avenue, a couple and their five children rush out of their vehicle to take cover. Only a meager hedge separates the road from a wasteland.

With a desperate reflex, the father pushes his offspring onto the sidewalk and covers them with his body. Several rockets whistle through the air and crash into the surrounding area with a deafening crash. Unharmed, the family gets up and runs towards an air raid shelter located on the other side of the road.

As soon as they take refuge in the concrete cube, the children burst into tears. One of them split his head when he threw himself to the ground. The youngest is shaking uncontrollably.

“We spent the night holed up in our apartment hoping for this hell to stop, but it seems like it’s here to stay. We’re evacuating the city,” the mother moaned. A precarious calm falls over the city. The family gets back in the car and disappears with a squeal of tires.

Twenty-four hours after the launch of Hamas’ surprise offensive, Sderot bears the scars of real carnage. In the city center, dozens of bullet-riddled cars lie in the middle of the road. In front of a bus stop, swarms of flies devour huge puddles of dried blood. A spray of bullet holes stains the surrounding street furniture.

The day before, at dawn, half a dozen civilians were cut down there by Palestinian attackers. A little further away, a rocket crashed into the middle of a residential development. A tree blown by the explosion collapsed on a car.

“It happened early this morning, the terrorists continued to bomb us all night,” explains Isaac, a local resident who came to see the damage. At his side, Nissim Abitbol, ​​an 88-year-old neighbor. “I was praying in the synagogue when Hamas launched its operation. I rushed home to my wife and we stayed indoors all day. The shots rang out all day, it was terrifying,” he says, his ear and cheek marked with deep scratches. Panicked at the start of the hostilities, his wife injured him by grabbing him too violently.

Loss of control

Two new roars ring out, each followed by a brief detonation. At around a hundred meters above sea level, the Israeli army’s anti-missile system, nicknamed “Iron Dome”, is waging a fierce battle to intercept missiles coming from Gaza.

Shrouded in a thick veil of smoke and dust, the Palestinian enclave is already paying the high price for the Hamas assault, the most ambitious in its 36 years of existence. Bombs from the IDF (Israeli army), dropped by a stream of fighters and drones whirring in the air, rain down on the old gray buildings of Beit Hanoun, a Gazan town located beyond the separation wall adjoining Sderot. According to Hamas, 413 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip and 2,300 others were injured.

Hidden in the middle of the thick urban fabric, Hamas gunners respond at regular intervals with brief volleys of rockets. One of them crashed into a mound of earth sheltering two Israeli tanks. Violent machine gun exchanges ring out near the Erez border crossing, conquered by Hamas on Saturday morning. Three bombs finally fall on the Israeli side of the checkpoint.

The Jewish state is struggling to regain control of its territory. At least 700 of its citizens are believed to have lost their lives since Saturday, and nearly 2,000 others have been injured.

On the outskirts of Sderot, a group of soldiers cautiously inspects the deserted streets. “We have been informed that a man speaking Arabic is trying to enter a house, so we have to comb the area,” explains the commander of the unit, made up of a majority of reservists mobilized urgently.

Four hours later, the IDF asked residents of around 20 Gaza border towns – including Sderot – to evacuate the region. Eight Israeli locations were still the scene of fighting on Sunday, most of them located in the east of the Gaza Strip.

Among the vast expanses on the edge of the Negev desert, the infiltration of Hamas fighters always sows psychosis.

At the entrance to Ofakim, a town located 18 kilometers from the Gaza border, Ramy, 43, smokes a cigarette with a worried air. “According to rumors, there are still two or three terrorists hiding in the city. It’s incredible that Hamas has managed to penetrate so deep into the land. Israel has never experienced such a situation,” he rages.

Imminent response

Throughout the streets, police cars are omnipresent. Around thirty police officers in assault gear methodically inspect each building bar. Following them, a team of deminers are combing through the homes affected by the fighting. In one of them, a grenade blew up the ground floor. The celebratory remains of the religious holiday of Sukkot – a seven-branched candlestick, a woven loaf of bread and a prayer book – lie among the charred rubble of the living room.

Before being stopped in their murderous escape, Hamas fighters followed the same operating procedure in Ofakim as in Sderot: massacre as many civilians as possible without any apparent military aim.

“The rockets started raining at 6:30 a.m. [samedi]. Less than an hour later, the terrorists entered our neighborhood and shot indiscriminately at the few onlookers. I was at the window. Three people were killed in front of my eyes,” says Melissa, 26, whose apartment came under a burst of fire from Hamas men.

“After that, they drove around the neighborhood. The police took almost 30 minutes to arrive! This is a complete failure of our security forces. We didn’t see it coming. But now our army must move forward. It must destroy Hamas without causing too much collateral damage among the civilians of Gaza. »

The young woman’s thirst for revenge could soon be quenched. Benjamin Netanyahu promised on Saturday to transform Gaza into a “desert island” in response to the Hamas offensive while his army announced the mobilization of tens of thousands of reservists. They are already flocking to the south of Israel, where gigantic convoys of heavy weapons await them.

In the parking lot of a gas station located north of Sderot, several hundred soldiers waited Sunday afternoon in the shadow of around twenty tanks loaded on gigantic semi-trailers. Following them, trucks filled with shells were alongside several Lynx multiple rocket launchers, one of the flagships of the Israeli arms industry. An assault helicopter heading south flies overhead.

“We are waiting for the order to enter Gaza, it should not be long. I hope we will put an end to these terrorists once and for all,” says impatiently Eyat, a young soldier stationed in front of a trailer full of ammunition. Several of his comrades agree.

“If we want to, we have the means to make short work of Hamas. It’s going to bleed,” says one of them. In the distance, carried by the warm October wind, the first detonations of Israeli artillery resound across the countryside. Long days of war lie ahead in Gaza.