Escalation it is, then.
Most of the residents of the Gaza Wrapper have evacuated their homes. We officially have refugees now. The Hamas realized that the one thing that Iron Dome doesn't protect against is mortars, and they are shooting a hundred a day at least. Life is no longer livable in those villages and Kibbutzes around the border fence. On Israel's side, aerial
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The width of Israel at its widest is 100 km. That's about a third of the width of Switzerland, I think. So it should give you a sense of proportion about these distances. My mother and nephew live in Beer-Sheva, which you can see in the 60 seconds strip in this map. The distance between Beer-Sheva and Gaza is about the same as, let's see, the distance between Winterthur and Zug. Only in a different direction. I live in the are marked as "Dan" in this map, and my sister and middle niece are in the "Shfela" area. That's the 90 seconds zone. My other niece just moved up further north to the Beit-She'an Valley, so although she is in the 60 seconds strip for Lebanon/Syria, she's rather safe from Gaza.
I don't think ground floor is enough. It depends, again, on the distance, because the long distance rockets are usually more destructive, and can pierce several floors. In the shorter distances, it also depends on your side walls. Personally, I don't trust anything which is not reinforced concrete. Not bricks, not anything that has windows, not internal dry-walls.
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Thanks for pointing out the distance so clearly for the non-scientific mind -)!
At least ground floor is a start - if you don't have to fear that whole building to tumble down on you. But it's not China, is it...?
Anyway, they should certainly make school start sort of voluntary, for those who have better protection at home and are afraid or already traumatised.
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I was going to say everyone take a vacation at Arabah, until Wikipedia taught me that it literally means "desolate and dry area" ;-).
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Groups with anti-Israeli sentiments are trying to launch denial-of-service attacks on Israeli web sites. You can view it as protest or terrorism, whichever fits your fancy, but the idea is to make it hard for users in Israel to surf the web freely. So both civilian and government web sites that estimate their content's availability abroad is less important than its domestic availability ask their upstream internet provider to block upsteam access to their IP from outside of Israel. This annoys the heck out of Israelis abroad that try to use their banks or news web sites, but it allows most of us inside to run our lives as usual even through serious coordinated attacks. In addition it also blocks some of the attempts to actually break into web sites.
Actually, the Arabah is not that bad. There are a lot of villages and Kibbutzes there as well, they grow excellent tomatoes, watermelons and other fruits and whatnot. But it's not a place where you can move a large mass of population. Infrastructure is very thin. Besides, the only reason rockets don't fall there is that there are not many people there. :-)
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The pictures I've seen of Arabah showed cute little guest-houses, but no tomatoes and hardly a green spot anywhere. Arabah tomatoes, though - yeah, I see what you mean :-)!
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