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| Alarm: Ashkelon, a city with 26,000 schoolchildren, is working on ways to guard citizens against rockets. Ariel Schalit/AP |
Israelis bolster new front line with Gaza
Ashkelon, an Israeli city 11 miles north of Gaza, has become a new target for Palestinian rocket fire.
By Ilene R. Prusher | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the March 13, 2008 edition
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Ashkelon, Israel - When Alan Marcus moved here from Framingham, Mass., more than 30 years ago, this was a quiet seaside city relatively far from the Middle East's strife-ridden hot spots.
Seemingly overnight, it became a frontline community in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And Dr. Marcus, who has a PhD in physical geographic environments, has been trying to transform Ashkelon from a sleepy beach town to a city ready to weather a rain of rockets from Gaza – and to keep the city's citizens from getting hurt.
This effort includes a computerized system that he developed and a high-tech situation room, opened just two weeks ago, to dispatch help when rockets fall.
"This has been quite a change," he acknowledges, surveying the nerve center he has been setting up over the past year and a half. With bird's-eye mapping – the most detailed in Israel, he says – he can immediately zero in on the area hit, know who or what was hit, and how to respond.
After several strikes on Ashkelon last month, Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza on Feb. 29, in which more than 120 Palestinians and three Israelis died. Amid global criticism over the loss of life – and stepped-up efforts from Washington and Cairo to forge some kind of cease-fire – Israel pulled back and Palestinians have been launching fewer missiles and rockets.
But realizing that a new dynamic has emerged in the conflict, Ashkelon is taking serious precautions. The one thing it doesn't have yet is a surefire way to find people to a safe place when the missile is careening in their direction. The city has 26,000 schoolchildren, but no schools are armored. And though there are shelters, Marcus notes, its impossible to get to most of them in time. "You only have 15 seconds to get to a safe place."
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, visiting here Tuesday, told people to "grit their teeth" and face the likelihood that – despite what appears to be a cooling off in the war between the Israeli military and Palestinian militant groups in Gaza – Ashkelon would suffer more attacks. An hour after he left what had been billed as a "solidarity visit," a Qassam rocket was shot at Ashkelon from Gaza. The rocket, the first in two days, landed in an open area in southern Ashkelon. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a secular left-wing group, claimed responsibility for it, Reuters reported.
The continued, if intermittent, rockets have fomented some confusion about whether Israel and Hamas might quietly be moving toward a cease-fire. Earlier in the week, both denied that was the case. On Wednesday, however, Hamas outlined demands for such a truce.
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