Gaza is more than a simplistic morality play/By Mick Hume THE TIMES, 29/12/08):
Those images of the carnage caused by Israeli airstrikes inside the Gaza Strip brought to mind another film of bomb victims that I watched early this month in Sderot, an Israeli town targeted by rockets fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza.
In a bomb-proof room at the ambulance station Tiger Avraham, the chief paramedic, showed us his grisly home movie of the aftermath of an attack. We were told that 23 Israeli civilians had been killed, more than a thousand injured and many more traumatised by rockets since 2004. Nobody mentioned the two Gazan youths killed in an Israeli airstrike the day before our visit.
Mr Avraham embodies the Sderot siege mentality: “It is not easy to live here. For five years my little one has slept in a bomb shelter.” He could leave for Tel Aviv or America, but “I am here because it gives a sense of meaning to my life. Here I am not only a Jew, I’m an Israeli.”
Asked his view of Palestinian…
Those images of the carnage caused by Israeli airstrikes inside the Gaza Strip brought to mind another film of bomb victims that I watched early this month in Sderot, an Israeli town targeted by rockets fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza.
In a bomb-proof room at the ambulance station Tiger Avraham, the chief paramedic, showed us his grisly home movie of the aftermath of an attack. We were told that 23 Israeli civilians had been killed, more than a thousand injured and many more traumatised by rockets since 2004. Nobody mentioned the two Gazan youths killed in an Israeli airstrike the day before our visit.
Mr Avraham embodies the Sderot siege mentality: “It is not easy to live here. For five years my little one has slept in a bomb shelter.” He could leave for Tel Aviv or America, but “I am here because it gives a sense of meaning to my life. Here I am not only a Jew, I’m an Israeli.”
Asked his view of Palestinian…