Mick Hartley

The side of the story we normally don’t get to hear: reporting from Sderot in Israel, just over the border from the Gaza strip and the Hamas rocket launchers:

It is more than five years since the first Qassam hit Sderot, which sits on the western edge of Israel’s Negev desert, a little more than a mile away from the high-rise blocks of the Palestinian city of Beit Hanoun. In that time, more than 2,000 rockets have struck homes, schools, offices, factories and a local synagogue. Miraculously, only eight people have been killed (three of them small children) and a few dozen more wounded, but the bombardments – sometimes sporadic, often intense – have become a permanent and frightening part of the fabric of everyday life for Sderot’s 24,000 inhabitants.

Over the past decade or so, other communities in Israel have suffered much heavier casualties from terrorist attacks: suicide bombers have killed scores of civilians and more than 40 people died when Hezbollah’s rockets rained down on towns in the north of the country during the brief war in Lebanon last year. But none have endured such a prolonged and draining ordeal under fire as Sderot, whose long-suffering residents suggest, with gallows humour, that on a map of conflict in Israel, their home should be permanently represented by a bull’s-eye…

Almost every attack results in 20 to 30 people being taken to the centre to be treated for shock, most exhibiting the classic symptoms: crying, stammering, sometimes trembling so violently they cannot control their limbs. In many of the cases, this gives way to what is classified in Hebrew as harada – a state of acute anxiety, often accompanied by feelings of helplessness and depression, that can persist for months on end…

“To be frank, the mental-health situation here is shocking and it’s getting worse, we need all the help we can get. But the best thing that could happen would be a lasting peace.”

The most tragic victims of the Qassams are Sderot’s children, one in three of whom suffers from PTSD according to a survey published last year. Like their parents, they spend much of their lives “on alert”, dreading the next attack, unable to concentrate at school or enjoy the normal pleasures of childhood at home. “It is a sad fact that there are 10-year-old kids who require tranquillisers daily,” says Liora Fima, head of a local elementary school where about half the pupils were being kept away by their parents.