Escalation it is, then.

[real_skeptic]

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

Comments

[real_skeptic]

Ah, OK, here is a copy of the image. Many Israeli web sites are currently blocked to the outside world due to severe cyber attacks against Israel.

[saminz]

Thank you! Can't be all that classified, then.

I was going to say everyone take a vacation at Arabah, until Wikipedia taught me that it literally means "desolate and dry area" ;-).

[real_skeptic]

Nah, certainly not classified. :-) It's information that's supposed to be available to everybody in Israel, being important for everybody's safety.

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. :-)

[saminz]

I'm glad that you can use lj, then. I sure hope that everyone finds a possibility to stay in touch with their friends abroad, even if it certainly makes sense to prioritise on behalf of those in immediate danger.

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 :-)!