After a weekend of deadly Palestinian fire on the Israeli city of Ashkelon, the underground bunker where public officials studied CCTV and incoming rockets from Gaza was hushed Monday amid a tentative ceasefire.
Half-drained coffee cups and unfinished sandwiches still sat on desks, but opposite city hall, the parking lot of a local mall was packed as people went back to business as usual.
Earlier in the day, the leaders of Gaza’s terror groups announced a ceasefire with Israel, ending a sharp escalation of violence that threatened another war between them. There was, as in previous truces, no confirmation from the Israeli side, but there were no reports of rocket launches or retaliatory Israeli strikes during the day and Israel lifted security precautions on residents.
The intense fighting over the past two days came to a halt early Monday and residents on both sides went back to their daily routines. Schools and roads had been closed, and Israelis had been urged to remain indoors and near bomb shelters as the deadliest rocket fire since the 2014 Gaza war pounded the area on Saturday and Sunday.
On a highway along the Gaza border, the army on Monday began assembling two-meter-high concrete barriers, a day after civilian Moshe Feder, 68, was killed on the road when an anti-tank missile struck his car in an attack claimed by Hamas, according to Hebrew reports.
He was one of four Israeli fatalities in the violence, which saw over 600 rockets fired at Israeli towns and cities from the Gaza Strip, drawing over 300 Israeli reprisal airstrikes. The other three victims — Moshe Agadi, 58; Ziad al-Hamamda, 47; and Pinchas Menachem Prezuazman, 21 — were killed by rocket fire and buried on Sunday.
Civilians on both sides of the Gaza border, just four kilometers (2.5 miles) from Ashkelon’s city limits, said they were unhappy with the absence of a long-term solution and feared it would not be long before the bloodletting resumed.
An army official cautioned Monday night that war could be back in just a few weeks if the government did not change its policies and work to ease conditions in the Strip.
Israel appears to have little appetite for another prolonged conflict. Later this week, the country marks Memorial Day, one of the most solemn days of the year, followed by the festive Independence Day. Next week, Israel is to host the popular Eurovision song contest, and the fighting could have deterred visitors.
For some, though, sirens and rockets have become part of daily life.
Sitting in his blast-proof office, Ashkelon’s municipal chief of emergency services and security, Yossi Greenfeld, said rockets have pummeled his town since 2006, a year after Israel’s pullout from the Gaza Strip.
The fire intensified, he said, after the Islamist terror movement Hamas seized power in Gaza from the administration of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in 2007.
“People here, in going about their daily lives, take into account the possibility of rocket fire,” he told AFP.
“Every resident is aware that he can find himself going from routine to a state of emergency in seconds.”
Israel said some 690 rockets were fired from Gaza in total and it hit some 350 terror targets in the strip in retaliation.
Hamas’s military wing boasted Monday that it had developed a new rocket-launching tactic that “overcame” Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, leading to the deaths and injuries of numerous Israelis over the past two days.
A spokesman for Hamas’s Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Abu Obeida, said in a social media post that “The Qassam Brigades, thanks to God, succeeded in overcoming the so-called Iron Dome by adopting the tactic of firing dozens of missiles in one single burst.”
“The high intensity of fire and the great destructive ability of the missiles that were introduced by the Qassam [Brigades]… succeeded in causing great losses and destruction to the enemy,” he added.
In fact, while Hamas and Islamic Jihad indeed attempted to overwhelm Iron Dome by repeatedly firing large fusillades at a specific location, few of the rockets actually succeeded in penetrating the system.
In one case, over the course of one hour on Sunday evening, at least 117 rockets were fired at the city of Ashdod, but only one of the projectiles aimed at Ashdod made it past Israel’s air defenses.
That rocket killed Pinchas Menachem Prezuazman, 21, a dual American-Israeli citizen, as he was running for shelter as the alert siren sounded.
Three other Israelis were killed in attacks from the Strip on Sunday: Moshe Agadi, 58; Zaid al-Hamamdeh, 47; and Moshe Feder, 68.
Feder was not killed by ballistic rocket fire, but by an anti-tank guided missile fired at his car as he drove on a road near the Gaza border.
He sustained a serious shrapnel wound to the leg, causing significant blood loss, and was pronounced dead at Ashkelon’s Barzilai Medical Center after resuscitation efforts failed. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.
During the fighting, Hamas also attempted to use a new style of rocket, one with a short range and a heavy warhead, packed with dozens to hundreds of kilograms of explosives.
The terror group believed these rockets would get past Israel’s air defenses, just as, during the 2014 Gaza war, Iron Dome struggled to intercept short-range mortar shells.
However, the military said technological upgrades and other improvements to the Iron Dome allowed it to shoot down the short-range rockets this time.
In total, 35 rockets and mortar shells from the Gaza Strip struck populated areas over the course of Saturday and Sunday.
The military said that while this underlined that the Iron Dome is not impenetrable, the system was overall effective, with 240 interceptions and an 86 percent success rate — similar to previous rounds of intensive rocket fire.
The Iron Dome’s radars also successfully spotted every rocket and mortar launch, which ensured that Israelis were warned of incoming projectiles ahead of time by sirens.
In all, Gaza’s terror groups fired some 690 projectiles at Israel during the two days of fighting.
In response to the onslaught, the Israeli military conducted over 300 strikes from the air and land, including a rare assassination of a terrorist operative, who the IDF said funneled money from Iran to terror groups in the Strip.
“In the past two days, we’ve renewed the policy of assassinating senior terrorists. We’ve killed dozens of Hamas and [Palestinian] Islamic Jihad terrorists and we toppled terror towers,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is also defense minister, said Monday.
A spokesperson for Hamas also said that although the recent flareup in violence had come to an end, the wider conflict would continue.
“The resistance managed to deter the IDF,” said Sami Abu Zuhri, according to the Kan public broadcaster, referring to the Gaza terror groups.
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