6-May-14: Independence Day and another inbound rocket from Gaza

From the Sha'ar Hanegev regional
Council website's homepage

The Tzeva Adom ("Color Red") incoming rocket warning siren was heard in parts of the Sha'ar Hanegev region of southern Israel at about 6:45 pm this evening, Tuesday. Residents, many of them still involved in Independence Day festivities, rushed to seek immediate shelter. There is still no official confirmation that we can see, but from Hebrew eye-witness reports posted online, it appears a rocket, fired from Gaza, crashed to earth and exploded close to the Gaza/Israel border fence. We are not aware of reported injuries or damage to property.

There's a temptation to connect this attack with the fact that Israelis have been celebrating the 66th anniversary today of our country's independence. But the reality is that incoming rockets have been arriving at the rate of roughly one a day since the year 2000. The fact that Israeli forces and Israeli civilians withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 had the effect of massively enlarging the size of the security threat posed to Israelis living within firing range of the Hamas-controlled terrorism-obsessed area.

For the record as we noted here ["2-May-14: Overnight rocket attack on southern Israel: no injuries, no damage, no reporting"], the IDF says there have been more than a hundred rocket attacks on southern Israel since the start of 2014. Most by far go unnoticed outside the attack zone.

(Some news sites reported during Tuesday night that the Tzeva Adom incoming rocket siren was heard in the vicinity of Kibbutz Mefalsim, which is within Sha'ar Hanegev. We were unable to find confirmation that there had indeed been a rocket attack there, and refrained from reporting it. It now appears the siren at Mefalsim was sounded because of a system fault, and there was no rocket attack in that area.)