March 1, 2008 - movement on the Gaza border
Israel responds to attacks on Ashkelon:
New and more powerful rockets have been used against one of Israel's larger cities

It is March 1, 2008, around 3 a.m. "“Tseva adom, tseva adom,” shrieks the speaker mounted on the building next to the apartment where I am staying on Kibbutz Nir-Am. "Color red, color red," is the English translation. This means that in about 15 seconds or less, a rocket fired from Beit Hanun in Gaza will hit somewhere nearby.

My first impulse is to run. But for most people in this area, at 3 a.m. there is nowhere to run, no safe area. Public shelters are in the street, or outside somewhere. There are few homes with "safe rooms," a constant request made of the government.

As I am writing this the alarm sounds again, so I sit here, breathe deeply, and count: eight, nine, ten, boom.... then another boom. Two rockets falling close by and exploding.

In the two weeks I've been here rockets have fallen all around the kibbutz where I'm staying, three falling within a few hundred feet of my building. Forty were launched on Wednesday the 27th. Now it's the first day of March, barely, and the Israelis are rumored to be moving toward the border. I can hear heavy machinery somewhere in the distance.

People in this area have lived like this for eight years. It is unimaginable to me that they can go on, but they do. Some have left, most have stayed. Many more would leave if they could sell their homes, which have lost half their value. But many will not be moved. "This is my country," I am frequently told. "We want to live just like people do in other countries."

So what do you do when the rockets are falling, and there's no place to go? Go crazy, or go back to sleep. I choose to go back to sleep.