Sderot, Israel - Morning rush hour in Israel - and Sderot is a virtual ghost town. The streets are almost completely bare of cars, trucks or buses. Only a handful of pedestrians are on the sidewalks. Most of the 26,000 residents of this town located adjacent to the Gaza Strip seem to be huddled behind the closed shutters of their block-like apartment buildings, waiting for the rockets which have been a feature of their daily life since 2001.
Palestinian militants, in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip have fired around 10,000 missiles and mortars at southern Israel in the past eight years and Sderot, because of its proximity to the salient, is an easy and frequent target.
On December 27, after 200 or rockets and mortars were launched following the end of a six-month truce on December 19, Israel unleashed its air force.
It began attacking Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip in an operation Israeli leaders said was intended to change the reality under which residents of Sderot and other Israeli communities in range of the Gaza rockets had to live
The fighting is out of sight of Sderot residents, but definitely not out of mind.
Two "booms" which almost simultaneously puncture the soft, damp morning air cause the few people out on the streets to freeze and look around anxiously.
There had been no warning, no "Code Red" announcement broadcast over the loudspeakers especially set up around the town.
"We are worried, but we are not scared. We have gotten used to it," David Mansour says.
"It's not nice to go against a civilian population," his friend David Amar comments, of the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip. "But it has to be done."
"The whole world is against us because we are reacting," he says. "But where has the world been for the past eight years?"
Despite the intensity of their views, their tone is laconic, almost lacking passion.
"Nerves here are taut," notes Andy David, a Foreign Ministry official sent to the town to brief visiting correspondents.
Mansour, Amar and the two other people with them are practically the only residents of the town out in the open in the early morning.
Townspeople have been ordered to remain at home and not to congregate in public places. Most take the instruction seriously.
Eli Asayag sits forlornly in his empty cafe, going through the motions of preparing food for customers he knows will not come. The room is dark, almost gloomy, since most of the windows remain shuttered, for protection in case rockets land nearby.
He says that since the start of the Israeli operation began and despite the threat of rockets landing in the town, he still opens up at 7 a.m. each day. But since the operation began, each day he has to throw away large amounts of uneaten food.
Asayag's cafe is one of the very few places open in the town. Except for a few kiosks and grocery stores, shops are shut and shuttered. Even the town's huge market is barren and desolate.
Yet despite the uncertain feeling of exposure people get out in the streets, most residents, says Foreign Ministry official David, "feel that the Israeli government is finally doing what it is supposed to do, and that is protecting its citizens."
Sderot residents have been in the forefront of those demanding the Israeli government take military action to end the rocket and mortar fire.
Their town has the unwelcome distinction of being the longest- bombed place on earth over the last two years, and evidence of the rockets is all over - in the streets whose potholes are actually mini-craters from rockets, in the new gleaming windows set in old decaying walls, and the pock-marked buildings.
One rocket which landed on Monday outside an apartment block peppered the wall with holes, and sent shutters hanging precariously askew.
By some miracle, the rocket missed gas balloons but its shrapnel - in addition to explosives the rockets are often filled with nuts, bolts and ball bearings, to cause maximum damage - decapitated a dove.
"Life here is a matter of Russian Roulette," a volunteer in Sderot noted during a rocket offensive before the siz-month truce.
There is usually a 15 second time gap between the "Colour Red" broadcast and the missile strike. Not everyone can make it to a shelter in time, and residents are told that in such an eventuality, they need to take shelter in the building's stairwell.
A group of young Israelis mill around the parking lot of an empty shopping centre, talking and eating sandwiches in the light rain.
They are volunteers, who come from all over Israel, to help out in the aftermath of a rocket attack by helping clear up the debris, assist the elderly, comforting children, and so on.
"If people can live here, we can be here," says Gabi Grabin, the group's leader.
At 11.25 am that morning, the volunteers went into action. A rocket scored a direct hit on a house in the town.
