Life in the firing line:

The town waiting for the bombs to fall

ZOHAR AVITAN doesn’t go to the bathroom unless his shoes are pointing in the right direction.

With bombs raining down on the Israeli city of Sderot, he needs to be able to run out of the door at a moment’s notice.

That’s the harsh reality of everyday life for people there, with everyone using a Red Alert phone app that gives 10-second warnings of targeted rocket attacks.

Mr Avitan, 64, is a manager at Sapir College just outside the city. He was forced to shut students out of the institution on the orders of the Israeli army. The college’s halls of residence are yards from a bakery that was destroyed.

He said: “You’re always walking around with an unpleasant feeling. It’s a way of life.

“It’s very hard because we don’t know when the missiles are going to be shot and where they are going to fall.

“One time when I was abroad, I heard a noise that reminded me of the noise from the siren and I ran.

“I don’t go to the bathroom unless my shoes are facing the right way so I can jump into them to run.

“I am old enough to deal with it, but some people can’t deal with the problem, including young children. There is a lot of pressure on young kids. Many of them don’t know anything else. They were born into the situation.”

When I visited Sderot almost 500 rockets were fired on civilian targets, including family homes and high street shops. It was a ghost town.

Schools, colleges and businesses were forced to close, and citizens cowered in bomb shelters.

Every home in Sderot has a bomb shelter and every citizen has the “Red Alert” mobile phone app that gives 10- to 40-second warnings of targeted rocket attacks (depending on how close you live to the border).

Avitan’s home in Sderot was hit by a rocket fired from Gaza recently and he admitted he survived only because his wife insisted they retreat to a bomb shelter.

He said: “There was an explosion at my house and my son’s car was totally lost. My car was badly damaged. The windows of my home exploded. In my house we found many small pieces of metal. The small metal pieces can kill.

“I was lucky because I went into the shelter. We were in the middle of dinner and I didn’t want to go into the shelter but my wife screamed at me and when your wife says something you must do it.”

Sapir College, where Avitan has worked for more than 40 years, is the “most sheltered institute in the world,” according to the softlyspoken Israeli. In 2008, the government opted to cover the building with a huge concrete shelter. The decision was made days after 35-year-old student Rony Ichia was killed in a rocket attack.

Theoretically, students can remain at their desks as the rockets are fired. However, in practice it is not always the case.

Mr Avitan said: “Sometimes the students hear the alarm and they are not strong enough to handle it, so they have to be taken to hospital – they are traumatised.”

Israeli law student Neria Dedon, 31, who defied the warnings to come to the near-deserted Sapir College last week, admitted: “It’s not safe to be here. It’s dangerous. Gaza is three kilometres from here. They often attack. It’s been like this for 20 years. Sometimes I am very afraid. It’s not good for us. My children and my wife moved to Jerusalem, but I need to stay here to study.”

Netanel Zitun, 30, who is also a law student, took me to a commemorative stone next to

a bomb shelter in the college grounds. He said: “Ten years ago a student died right there. Gaza is very close. I have seen many explosions.”

Sderot mayor Alon Davidi said three of his seven children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

I spoke to Mr Davidi at an emergency control centre next to a school in Sderot. A bank of wall-mounted screens allow staff to see every street. All of them were deserted last week.

“The regime in Gaza believe in death,” he said. “They don’t send the rockets to army bases, they send them to Sderot. To my family, to the people of Sderot.

“I have seven kids and three suffer from the post-trauma problem. It’s very tough. It’s depression. If you grow up in this situation, every time you go out the door someone is trying to kill you. My kids don’t understand anything else.

“But I want to say I don’t hate anyone. We think about the simple people that live in Gaza. But this is about the fight between the ideology of death and the ideology of life.”

I requested access to Gaza to see the devastation on the other side of the border, but a foreign office spokesman declined. “The border is closed,” said the spokesman. “It’s not safe.”

The mayor added: “I know the picture that comes from Gaza is a bad picture. But our army must protect us.

I accept they must do whatever they can to protect us.”

I stopped for lunch at a roadside cafe – one of the few in the area that had opened – and was twice interrupted by a flurry of notifications on my phone that forced every diner to shuffle into a reinforced concrete bomb shelter, along with heavily-armed soldiers who were also eating at the cafe.

In the calm chaos, people’s worried faces were lit up by the mobile phone screens as they waited for the all-clear. When it came they simply continued eating lunch. I later learned a nearby home was smashed by a rocket. Mercilessly, there were no deaths in the city of Sderot, but several people were wounded by shrapnel.

In the nearby town of Ashkelon, a man was killed and two women seriously injured when a rocket slammed into an apartment in a four-storey building.

At least one civilian in Israel died last week and several were killed by Israeli air strikes in Gaza. The barrage followed a botched spying mission by Israeli special forces several miles inside Gaza on November 11.

An Israeli lieutenant colonel and seven Palestinians died in an exchange of gunfire in the first known ground incursion there by Israeli forces since the last war in 2014.

Among the dead was a commander in Hamas’s armed wing. Israel denied the operation was a targeted assassination, suggesting the Israeli special forces did not want to be discovered.

A statement issued later by the Israeli Defence Forces said the operation “was not intended to kill or abduct terrorists but to strengthen Israeli security”.

Meanwhile, Sderot’s 24,000 residents are caught in the crossfire. And this city under siege has piqued the interest of international statesmen.

Among the previous visitors to Sderot’s Sapir College is Barak Obama – shortly before his election as US president – and Ban Ki-moon, when he was United Nations secretary general.

Speaking after the visit to Sapir College in 2012, Ban Ki-moon said: “Nothing justifies the indiscriminate firing of rockets and mortars into Israel. It is completely unacceptable to target and terrorise citizens on a near-daily basis. It must stop. Any such attack must be condemned. Just before coming here, I visited Gaza. Gaza’s civilians are also suffering. They are vulnerable to militant activity and military operations by Israel.

After two days of intense fighting a ceasefire mediated by the United Nations and the Egyptians allowed civilians in Sderot and in Gaza to emerge from hiding.

But the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been under pressure to adopt a more aggressive policy against Gaza – his defence minister resigned over the issue last week – so the ceasefire may not hold for long.