Just three miles from the Gaza border, one Israeli city lives in fear of Hamas attacks, writes Mark Weissin Sderot
WE WERE parking the car next to the Sderot council building when the main radio news channel interrupted its regular programme to announce "warning of incoming rocket in Sderot, warning of incoming rocket in Sderot".
We ran to the nearest reinforced-concrete bomb shelter, luckily only a few yards away. Ten seconds later, huddled with 20 other people, we heard the first explosion - then two more in quick succession.
"Don't leave yet," the locals told us, veterans of thousands of similar attacks. One should wait a couple of minutes before it is safe to venture on to the streets again.
The ambulances hurtled past us on their way to the impact site, about 300m (1,000ft) away.
One of the rockets landed in the front yard of number 72 Niram Street, leaving a smoking crater in front of the house. The building facade was blackened by the explosion and the two front windows were blown out. Rubble was strewn across the area, and the roof was badly damaged.
Vivian Fahima (74) was escorted out of the house to the waiting ambulance. She wasn't wounded, but she was in a state of shock, sobbing uncontrollably.
Another pensioner, also in shock, was carried on a stretcher to a second ambulance.
No one was wounded - another miracle for this town of 20,000 people, just three miles from the Gaza border.
Sderot has suffered more than any other Israeli community from militant rocket attacks from Gaza. More than 10,000 Kassam rockets have landed in Sderot and the adjoining western Negev in the last eight years.
Fahima's neighbour, Sylvia Lagrissa, said her house, just down the street, shook from the impact of the Kassam hit. She ran straight away to Fahima's home, fearing the worst for her neighbour and friend.
"We should be used to it by now - the rockets fall like rain in Sderot - but it's impossible to get used to terror."
Lagrissa's daughter, Katy (20), underwent an operation to remove shrapnel from her leg following an earlier attack. "How can we be expected to live like this - to live our everyday lives like soldiers in the trenches on the front line?" Fahima asked. "We want this to end. We cannot go on like this."
Daniel Belhens (52) was born in Morocco, but moved to Sderot as a child. He said it was a great place to grow up in and the town was constantly developing. That is until the first rocket landed - and since then it's been downhill.
Belhens is a builder, but he hasn't worked for more than a year. "Who wants to waste money on renovations when their home could be destroyed at any moment?" he asked. He described life in Sderot over the last eight years as a catastrophe.
"Thirty per cent of the people have left - most to Ashkelon and Ashdod, but now rockets are landing there as well."
Two years ago, a rocket landed close to his home, and another one close to his daughter's school. Since then, Irit, now 12, has been traumatised: her grades have plummeted and she can't be left at home alone.
Belhens, like everyone else one speaks to in Sderot, supported the war against Hamas.
"I hope at the end of this there will be a real ceasefire - for our sake and theirs," he said. "At the end of the day, Jews and Arabs are cousins. They shouldn't be fighting."