semitism.net

When I was traveling in the West Bank, I kept hearing about kids and adults with signs of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Just about everyone there has terrible stories to tell. Families rounded up and forced to stand at gunpoint, kids cowering under the beds, humiliation or violence at checkpoints, beatings by the IDF. Many, especially the children, bear the psychological marks: depression, irrational fears, bad dreams, bedwetting. It’s the same, I think, for the families of Sderot, the small Israeli town just across the border from Gaza that is the usual target of Palestinian missiles…

From YNet, last week:

The dozens of Qassam rockets that landed in the southern city of Sderot Saturday have confined the residents to their homes, awaiting the Red Dawn alert system to warn them of another approaching rocket and send them running to the nearest shelter.

Five-year-old Liron Stikilov embraces her father Alexander as they stare at the Qassam shrapnel that smashed the bedroom window and tore the blinds.

“I was sleeping in bed with my mom, and then there was a sudden ‘boom’ and the glass shattered,” she says.

“I am very afraid of the Qassam. It has such a loud ‘boom.’ We’re moving to another home, right?”

Liron’s mother, Svetlana, 36, says, “She says (Liron) constantly asks that the family leave Sderot.”

Maybe the worst thing about this particular attack was the sheer stupidity of it. According to Yasser Abu Moailek’s Letter from Gaza, as well as multiple other sources, Hamas was parading a truck full of Qassam missiles through the crowded Jabaliya refugee camp. One of the missiles went off, killing twenty-one Palestinians, including three children. Trying to cover up its own responsibility, Hamas blamed the incident on Israel and fired the missiles at Sderot in the hope that this act of “retaliation” would make the denial more plausible.

No one was fooled:

Palestinian officials said the explosion was set off by the mishandling of explosives. The Interior Ministry issued a statement calling on Hamas “to shoulder its responsibility for these … explosions instead of making accusations against others.” (AP)

Israel’s reaction was as indiscriminate as Hamas’ provocation. The Air Force bombed Gaza City for four days, inaugurating as well a new technique for terrorizing the enemy. YNet, in an article posted during the operation, reported:

Since the beginning of the week, every two hours almost, during daylight, the airplanes appear. Each time, an F-16 flies through the Gaza sky, leaving behind it a sonic boom, destruction, and anxiety.

Every night, in order to disturb the residents’ sleep, the airplanes appear twice. The sonic booms have turned into the nightmare of Strip residents. They are waiting for them, know they are coming, and are having difficulties adjusting.

For the Air Force, those sonic booms are a true operation. The Strip is short after all, it takes seconds to fly over it, and the boom must appear in the right place. So they calculated the jets’ entry points with millisecond precision. They also checked different altitudes. Every time the planes fly a little lower, to enhance the effect.

In order to deepen the anxiety, every night there are power outages at different neighborhoods in the Strip. Israeli officials have denied any connection to them.

Israel killed fewer people in this bombardment than Hamas did with its mishandled explosives. That does not make it a humane or acceptable form of warfare, however. Post-traumatic stress aside, sonic booms have been shown to damage the auditory nerve. Children are particularly susceptible to hearing loss and consequent impaired language acquisition and developmental delay. Thus, hundreds of perfectly innocent kids may suffer long-term cognitive impairment.

None of these kids - Israeli or Palestinian - deserve what these adults - supposedly leaders - are doing to them.