A video of young children whimpering in an Ashkelon bomb shelter during a rocket scare has gone viral, highlighting frustration among southern residents at the persistent waves of violence battering the region.
The video was taken Tuesday night after a rocket alert siren went off in the coastal city just before midnight. The army later said no rocket was launched at the area, but that assurance didn’t help Reut Shpilman’s children as they shook in fear in the shelter.
“It’s very frustrating, the gap between understanding what’s happening here in the south and the way life just goes on outside the siren areas,” Shpilman, a mother of four, told Channel 12 news on Wednesday.
“In 30 seconds [after a siren sounds], we have to get four kids to the bomb shelter, which is outside the house. We can’t go on like this.”
The video, viewed over 86,000 times in the 20 hours after she posted it at 1:15 a.m. Wednesday, shows three of her children in the local bomb shelter.
Daughter Ori, 8, is seen visibly shaking and weeping as she tells her mother, “I don’t want to,” after being told they would return to the house.
Yonatan, 6, hands clasped in front of him, frowns and visibly shakes as he moves to stand next to his mother.
Noam, 3, clings to his mother’s leg.
“I don’t want…[inaudible]…there won’t be any more wars, enough,” says 8-year-old Ori, lips quivering.
Reut suggests, “Let’s go inside the house.”
But Ori refuses. “Mom, I don’t like it in the house. I want to stay here.”
“How long can we stay here?” Reut asks her daughter.
“I’m scared, I want to stay here,” Ori insists, continuing to shiver. “I want to stay here.”
She said she filmed her children fully 20 minutes after the siren had sounded, after realizing she wasn’t able to calm them down.
Israel carried out airstrikes in the Gaza Strip in response to earlier rocket fire on the nearby city of Sderot. There were no Israeli injuries, though a woman was lightly hurt while running to a shelter.
The brief flareup broke several days of calm following two days of intense fighting on November 12-13 between the IDF and Islamic Jihad-led fighters in Gaza which saw over 400 rockets fired at Israel.
Gazan health officials said 34 people in the Palestinian enclave were killed during the skirmish. The toll included over a dozen terrorists, but also eight members of a single family whose home was seemingly targeted by mistake.
During that conflict and others, a number of videos or pictures showing the plight of Israeli children cowering in bomb shelters or on sidewalks were widely shared.
The scuffle was the latest in a series of rounds of violence between Israel and Gaza over the last two years that have seen the region see-saw between intense fighting and temporary ceasefires.
Authorities have reported a sharp uptick in the number of residents of Gaza border communities suffering from symptoms of traumatic stress.
“These images repeat themselves with every siren. This is the reality we live with,” Shpilman told Channel 12.
“My kids aren’t depressive, they’re happy, functioning kids. But this follows them everywhere,” she said. “My daughter is afraid to get on the [school] bus, because the driver puts on the news and she hears about incendiary balloons or kassam rockets falling. She’s afraid to go back up to her room, she asks, ‘if the siren sounds, what will we do?'”
In a Facebook post that accompanied the video Wednesday morning, Shpilman lashed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other leaders for failing to ensure her family’s safety.
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