It has been an exceptionally dramatic week so far for Israelis, as the terrorist group Hamas launched an offensive consisting of dozens of rockets from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. While many rockets were intercepted, Israelis across the country were forced on the order of air sirens to seek refuge from their daily lives.
“The terrible thing is, you never know where the missiles will fall,” said Haim Yalin, the mayor of the Eshkol Regional Council, of living with the threat of Hamas. Speaking to Argentine outlet Infobae, Yalin, who governs one of the districts most threatened by Hamas, estimated that thirty missiles were raining towards Eshkol on a daily basis. While he notes that the Israeli government has spent “billions” on keeping the region, which borders Gaza, safe, the Palestinian government on the other side of the border has invested in shells to keep threatening them. The rockets could land “in a school, a nursing home– anywhere,” says Yalin, at any time.
Israelis equipped with cell phones captured precisely how difficult it is to gauge just where the Hamas terror threat will surface at any time, as sirens sounded everywhere–from a wedding interrupted by rockets to resorts sounding air sirens.
One man recorded the air sirens that interrupted his tennis game in Tel Aviv:
In another video distributed by the Israeli Defense Forces, children can be seen fleeing a pool within the potential strike zone of a Hamas rocket in southern Israel:
The air sirens continued into the night, as another observer recorded, as Hamas continued to attempt to shell various zones within Israel.
Few videos have surfaced of the Hamas rockets themselves, though the few purporting to be of just that are dramatic images. In one video, a flurry of rockets, apparently without direction, barrel through the sky on the Gaza/Israel border (note: Breitbart News has not independently verified the authenticity of this video):
Hamas does not only threaten the Israelis they attempt to kill with their rockets–evidence shows that Hamas terrorists deliberately launch rockets from civilian areas, creating “human shield” targets that corner the Israeli military into potentially sacrificing civilians to combat the Hamas threat.
The Israeli military nonetheless began an offensive in Gaza to target the safe havens of Hamas terrorists–or the terrorists themselves should they be planning an attack. In a video widely distributed by the IDF, five Hamas terrorists attempting to siege Israel by sea are swiftly killed in a mission clearly distant from any civilian targets:
In addition, Israel conducted a series of targeted strikes in Gaza today that killed Hafez Hamad, a high-ranking member of the local chapter of terrorist group Islamic Jihad. Israeli military sources confirmed to the New York Times that they had also struck and killed Muhammad Shaban, a senior Hamas military officer. Overall, the Israeli military confirmed to the paper that 150 rockets were fired into Israel, with at least 29 intercepted, while Israel’s offensive resulted in the successful targeting of five senior Hamas officials, 10 smuggling tunnels, 90 concealed rocket launchers and 18 weapon storage and manufacturing sites.