24-Oct-12: It's night, and the rockets keep coming in

At 10:10 tonight, Wednesday, a few minutes before we posted these lines, there was another rocket attack from Gaza on communities in southern Israel, this time impacting the hard-hit Hof Ashkelon region. We'll update this post once we know the outcome of the latest rockets. Meanwhile the Times of Israel is currently featuring a lead story headed "Southern Israel residents describe near-death hits, children out of school and non-stop missiles". 

Here's how it starts:

Talking about life under the threat of Gazan mortars and rockets, residents of the South on Wednesday described unfortified homes, a government that isn’t protecting them, and a “tragedy waiting to happen” as children congregate during periods of incoming fire.“Regretfully, we’re not protected. We have houses with asbestos roofs and cardboard ceilings,” Ilan Cohen of the Eshkol Region told Channel 2 TV.“At 7 a.m., we woke up to two red alerts. One of the alerts was actually very real when a missile scored a direct hit on the house,” he added dryly.Cohen wasn’t injured in the attack, but a neighbor barely survived a direct hit on the building, according to his description of events.“The State of Israel needs to wake up and make the right decision and protect us,” he said, and added: “Today was very close.”

These are difficult days and nights for a large part of the Israeli population - especially hard when they know that most Israelis are being spared the torment of living under round-the-clock rocket attack by seriously hateful men with death and destruction on their minds. That the agony is not being doled out evenly is obvious to the Israelis living within rocket distance of Gaza. And that's before they take into account the way some of the world's most influential news channels, the BBC in particular, continue to simply look the other way and ignore the ongoing barrages of Gazan missiles. The BBC's leading Middle East story at this hour, as it has been all day, is "Militants killed in Gaza strikes" where "Militants" means armed terrorists sitting on top of a mountain of locally-produced and fully-imported rockets, and "Gaza strikes" refers to Israel's defence forces surgically picking out the rocket-rich terrorist groups from among the population in which they have purposefully embedded themselves.

Feh.