Katyusha, ready for launching
Katyusha, ready for launchingIsrael news photo

The mayor of the northern town of Kiryat Shmonah warns, after the firing of a Katyusha rocket from Lebanon on Tuesday: "We are unprepared."

The day after the rocket was fired by Hizbullah terrorists into northern Israel, Israel found four more such rockets in southern Lebanon, ready for launching. The Tuesday night rocket landed near Kiryat Shmonah, but caused no casualties or major damage; a small fire broke out at the site.

Nissim Malka, the mayor of the long-beleaguered northern town, says, “Israel is not ready for the next, inevitable clash with Hizbullah. Funding for shelters, sirens and other security measures has been cut; ever since the Second Lebanon War [in 2006], we have gradually lost funding in many areas.”

Speaking with Arutz Sheva’s Hebrew news magazine’s Benny Toker on Wednesday, Malka said, “It’s ironic that Defense Minister Ehud Barak visited here on Tuesday and said that our city’s social problems are more acute than the security problems – and then just hours later, the rocket landed and confirmed what I and others have long felt. We are all exposed to the almost daily reports of the massive quantities of weapons being stored up by Hizbullah just over the border. The rocket gave Barak a painful reminder of our true situation.”

“We currently don’t have the money to pay for problems that constantly crop up,” Malka said. “For instance, after this last rain, two public shelters were flooded and the pumping system didn’t work. It will cost 150,000 shekels to get these important shelters, used by entire neighborhoods, back up and running. Without money, we simply can’t prepare for the next clash.”

Mayor Malka said that in recent months, “there has been relative quiet [from the direction of Lebanon], and the emergency warning system was even turned off because there had been a few false alarms that caused unnecessary tensions among the residents. We have been trying, during this period, to recover financially, but this last rocket has taken us several years backwards.”