President visits town battered by Gaza rockets
A barrage of rockets battered an Israeli town less than half a mile from the Gaza fence today – seriously wounding a woman – just before the arrival of President Shimon Peres.
Mr Peres clashed with his own security guards over the visit to Sderot, overruling their demand that he cancel the trip.
Instead, he visited a house next to a building that has been hit three times by rockets from Gaza.
Mr Peres said later that he told his security staff: “I can’t go back. I am the president of all the citizens of Israel. I must come here to say thank you to the people of Sderot.”
He also attended a ceremony in which a new Torah scroll was entered into a Sderot synagogue.
There appeared to be no connection between the visit – which Mr Peres’s office ordered to be kept secret until it was over – and the salvo of at least 12 rockets fired by Hamas militants in nearby Gaza.
Hamas, the Islamic militant group that rules Gaza, was retaliating for an Israeli airstrike that killed six Hamas police officers in Gaza.
The rocket that hit the house today left a hole in the ceiling and damaged the living room. Another rocket hit a power line and briefly blacked out part of the town.
Sderot is a favorite target of Gaza rocket squads, because it is near the fence and presents a relatively large populated area within the range of the small, homemade rockets.
The town of 20,000 has a rocket alert system that gives warnings a few seconds before rockets explode in the town.
The rockets cause few serious casualties, but they have badly disrupted the life of the town.
Residents of Sderot have been traumatised by the almost daily rocket barrages. Significant numbers have been diagnosed with stress-related disorders.
Before arriving in Sderot, Mr Peres visited Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, where Israelis wounded in yesterday’s suicide bombing attack in the southern town of Dimona were being treated.
