A “color red” missile siren was heard in the early hours of Friday morning in the Eshkol regional council just outside of Gaza, after a rocket was shot down after being fired on the same region just a week ago last Friday.
The rocket has yet to have been located in Israeli territory, meaning it likely fell on the Gaza side short of its mark. The rock may also have been a false alarm – or may still be found.
Despite the August 26 ceasefire with Hamas that ended its most recent terror war, there has been a noted trickle of rocket fire from Gaza that continues, and likewise several instances of Gazans breaching the border into Israel.
Eshkol Regional Council head Chaim Yelin told Arutz Sheva after the last rocket attack last week that despite Operation Protective Edge, “the hourglass has already turned ahead of the next war,” and soon the rockets will be peppering the center of Israel as well.
Yelin added “it doesn’t make a difference to us who fires, Hamas or rebellious groups; we demand a military response against rocket fire on the residents of the state of Israel.”
Ahead of the rocket last Friday “color red” sirens were not sounded, and this issue of sirens has been a point of contention since the last operation, with sirens heard occasionally in September and October – including five in one day – with the IDF claiming all of them were false alarms.
Last month Maj. (res.) Ran Levy, a social activist who heads the ‘Hadromiyim’ (‘The Southerners’) organization fighting for the rights of residents of Israel’s embattled south, accused the IDF of covering up Hamas rockets for political purposes given the current ceasefire.
“I am an officer in the Home Front Command and I say, as a resident of Ashkelon, that there is no such thing as a false alarm and there never was,” claimed Levy. “Once the system identifies a launch, it calculates within a short time the area in which the rocket is expected to fall, so there is no such thing as a false alarm.”
Aside from the rocket threat, Hamas has also restarted building its terror tunnels into Israel, after bragging that the IDF didn’t destroy all of them. Nevertheless, Israel began transporting more construction materials into Gaza early last month as a “humanitarian gesture,” including 600 tons of cement, 50 truckloads of aggregate and 10 truckloads of steel.
