05-Oct-16: A Gazan rocket crashes into a residential street in southern Israel

The scene in Sderot earlier today [Image Source]

There has been another rocket attack on southern Israel today with damage to property and cars but thankfully no physical harm to people.

Being the day after Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year), the explosive device is a reminder that the insatiable appetites of the Palestinian Arab terrorist ranks for more mayhem and more Jewish victims produce largely unpredictable outbursts of violence directed at generally unpredictable targets and with unknowable outcomes.

What we can say with confidence is that ordinary people living peaceful lives on our side of the fence are again being terrorized.

Times of Israel published this at 10:40 am today (Wednesday):

A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip struck a street in the city of Sderot in southern Israel on Wednesday morning, police said. Two people who suffered anxiety attacks were treated by medical teams, but no one was physically hurt by the attack, according to the Magen David Adom medical service. The two — a 15-year-old girl and 60-year-old man — were taken to Ashkelon’s Barzilai Medical Center for further care, MDA paramedic Oren Benita said. Israel Defense Forces tanks responded to the rocket attack with strikes against Hamas sites in the northern Gaza Strip, the army said. The rocket alert siren was activated at approximately 10:20 a.m. and was heard in Sderot, Nir Am, Ivim and Gevim. A few minutes later, Israel Police officers located the rocket in Sderot. The road was slightly damaged in the attack, as were several nearby cars and homes. Police sappers were called to the scene, and the area was closed off to pedestrians and traffic, police said...

No physical injuries to Israelis but that, emphatically, was not the intention of the people doing the firing.

The terrorists of Gaza have a deep arsenal of rockets - thousands of them (this source estimates at least 12,000). The rocket men and their backers can pick their time, and they can afford to miss and then try again. Life, as measured by their own out-in-the-open value system, is extraordinarily cheap. Rockets are even cheaper. During the seven weeks of battle between Hamas terrorist forces and the IDF during the summer of 2014, Hamas managed to fire some 4,500 rockets and mortars in the general direction of Israel's cities and towns [source]. Israel's defensive Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepted 735 rockets. The system first ascertains that the inbound missiles are headed toward densely-populated areas and strategic facilities before launching against them. Thus Hamas fired many more rockets than Israel fired against.

The terrorists of Gaza evidently chose to fire today rather than, say, yesterday or the day before because, on those other days, all the Israeli schools and all the Israeli kindergartens were closed. In fact, the whole country was on holiday to mark Jewish New Year.

So they fired today and during the morning hours when those schools and those kindergartens are filled with children. That's one of the reasons they are terrorists.

The photo at the top of this post does a better job than the text above of explaining how just how maddeningly random the outcomes of these terror eruptions are and how miraculous that the losses were not catastrophic.

How far from the homes of ordinary Sderot civilians did today's rocket crash? It's not hard to see; take a look. The answer is: mere meters. (A video clip on the Israel National News site [here] makes this reality even clearer.)

Did the rocket-men care? Of course they cared; they sought, as they always seek, to inflict the maximum possible pain and fear that their life-threatening efforts could produce.

Here's a security-camera view (via Times of Israel and YouTube) of what the in-bound rocket looked like and felt like to the people on Sderot's streets. Those are city employees who stopped their truck on hearing the Tzeva Adom siren and then scattered as the explosion took place just meters from where they parked:

From experience, it's likely to be suggested now in parts of the media that those firing the rockets are not actually Hamas - the Islamist terrorists who rule the tiny Gaza enclave with an iron fist - but this or that so-called splinter group. And that by implication Hamas is against these random outbursts of violence and would prefer quiet and peaceful relations with their Israeli cousins.

We think that's unfounded wishful thinking and fails to take account of the ruthlessness with which terror regimes operate.