A rocket from Gaza was shot down as it streaked towards the Eshkol Regional Council area on Friday night and apparently landed in the region, in the second such attack since the August 26 ceasefire ended Operation Protective Edge.
According to Chaim Yelin, chair of the Eshkol Regional Council, it's only a matter of time until the next operation against Hamas, of which Protective Edge was already the third since Israel's 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
"It doesn't make a difference to us who fires," Yelin told Arutz Sheva. "Hamas or rebellious groups; we demand a military response against rocket fire on the residents of the state of Israel."
Yelin said he is convinced that rockets will soon be pummeling the center of the country as they did during the operation, saying "the hourglass has already turned ahead of the next war."
"Today it's in Eshkol, tomorrow in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and the military and diplomatic response needs to be appropriate," said Yelin. "The military achievement of Protective Edge is dissipating, with no national outline to give true quiet to the residents of the south and residents of the state of Israel."
The IDF has yet to locate the remains of the rocket fired on Friday, although it is thought to have landed in Israeli territory. "Color Red" rocket warning sirens were not sounded in Eshkol ahead of the rocket.
The issue of sirens has been a question point since the latest operation, with sirens being heard occasionally in September and October - including five in one day - with the IDF claiming all of them were false alarms.
Last month Maj. (res.) Ran Levy, a social activist who heads the 'Hadromiyim' ('The Southerners') organization fighting for the rights of residents of Israel's embattled south, accused the IDF of covering up Hamas rockets for political purposes given the current ceasefire.
"I am an officer in the Home Front Command and I say, as a resident of Ashkelon, that there is no such thing as a false alarm and there never was," claimed Levy. "Once the system identifies a launch, it calculates within a short time the area in which the rocket is expected to fall, so there is no such thing as a false alarm."
Hamas has also restarted building its terror tunnels into Israel, after bragging that the IDF didn't destroy all of them. Nevertheless, Israel began transporting more construction materials into Gaza early last month as a "humanitarian gesture," including 600 tons of cement, 50 truckloads of aggregate and 10 truckloads of steel.