Sunday’s rockets: One hit a study hall, and another one smashed into a children’s room – both with no one in them at the time.
The near-miracles occurred in Sderot and Be’er Sheva. The latter, Israel’s 7th-largest city, is 25 miles from Gaza – about three times further from Gaza than Ashkelon, the city that Israel’s signatory on the Oslo Accords, Yitzchak Rabin, promised would never be targeted by rockets.
In the summer of 1995, Rabin declared, "We know the scare-stories of the Likud. They promised [when the first Oslo agreement was signed, in 1993] that there would be Katyushas from Gaza. It's been a year already that Gaza is mostly under PA control, and there haven't been any Katyushas, and there won't be any.”
Shortly afterwards, on Aug. 11, 1995, the Jerusalem Post similarly opined, “A particularly favored line is that the Likud's dire predictions of Gaza turning into another Lebanon, with Katyusha rockets hitting Ashkelon, have proved unrealistic and plain silly.”
Ashkelon, of course, has long been in Hamas rocket range – and now even Be’er Sheva and other cities are also being targeted. Be’er Sheva has absorbed close to 40 Katyusha rockets over the past two weeks, including seven on one day.
This morning (Sunday), a rocket smashed into a private home, with fragments landing just a foot away from a bed in which two toddlers generally sleep. The bed, which was filled with fragments of glass and concrete, was empty at the time, as the family was huddling together in a next-door house.
Gabi, the father of the family, told Arutz-7’s Moshe Priel, “We heard several booms, but very soon I realized that one of them had hit my house, based on the shattering of glass and proximity of the explosion. With thanks to G-d, we were saved by a miracle. Our house and property suffered damage, but we are all OK.”
In Sderot, as well, a building generally frequented by a teacher of the Yeshivat Hesder in Sderot was smashed by a rocket on Sunday morning – but the teacher was not there at the time. He returned to find many of his texts on Jewish Law and Jewish Thought damaged.
Later on Sunday afternoon, in Ashdod – some 20 miles north of Ashkelon - another rocket fired by Hamas terrorists hit the wall of a nursery school. Seven people suffered shock-related injuries, but no one was physically hurt. The rocket was fired at 3:45 PM, during the daily 3-hour ceasefire Israel has declared for humanitarian purposes.