This town is cursed. Nothing is made, assembled, grown, bottled or canned here.
The 20,000 souls who live in Sderot — most of them Russian immigrants and second generation North Africans — live in a grim, development-town reality of grinding poverty and official neglect. And then there are the rockets.
Within eyeshot of northern Gaza, Sderot is at the receiving end of a variety of rockets launched several times a day from orchards, back yards and alleys by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah.
One of hundreds of prefabricated bomb shelters scattered across Sderot
The arsenal includes the home-made Kassams; the improved, longer-range Kassam 2; and more recently, the Iranian-supplied Grad. The irony of these attacks is that the people of Sderot are probably as poor and disenfranchised as the Palestinians who are firing the rockets at them. As a target, this town is a particularly poor choice to make a political point.
