In Sderot, an Israeli city just 2.5 kilometers from Gaza, the only sound you can hear when walking through its streets is that of the planes, helicopters and military artillery in use on the other side of the border. The boom! boom! It is continuous, and the absolute silence that adorns its streets only amplifies it.
Israel has expressed this week that it wants residents who lived near northern Gaza, such as those in Sderot, to return home soon. And Israel also communicates that hundreds of reservists fighting in the strip will return to their civilian lives sooner rather than later.
De-escalation in Gaza while war tension increases with Iran, with Hizbullah in Lebanon and in the West Bank?
In Sderot, on the border with the Palestinian enclave, in the largest city bordering Gaza, no one believes in de-escalation. Because on the ground nothing indicates it and because after three months of war here we continue to live as if on another planet, the same one that is drawn full of astronauts and far from Earth on the vaulted ceiling of its City Hall.
And there is no one and no one can be sensed in this city full of low-rise housing estates and stopped construction, which before October 7 housed some 30,000 people. The houses are closed tight. Cars can be counted on the fingers of one hand. And in the streets the dogs are the owners: when a stranger passes by, they start marking their territory.
The Israeli Defense Forces repeat that they have most of northern Gaza under their control. That their efforts are now focused on the center and south of the strip, where the Hamas leaders are believed to be, and that is why it is in these areas that most of the victims have been concentrated in recent days, which in total There are already more than 22,000. Especially in Khan Yunis and Rafah.
But in Sderot, opposite northern Gaza, nothing changes and no one returns.
There is no one in Sderot, and a young man next to the Town Hall who has run out of battery in his electric car explains that the local authorities have even seen fit to pay in order to encourage people to return. But he doesn’t turn back.
“There are only the mayor and the technicians,” he indicates, pointing to the City Council.
Yaron Sasson, the municipal spokesperson, who receives La Vanguardia in a City Hall room that looks like a bunker, argues like this: “People hope to return, but they don’t want to return because they want security, and now there is none. On New Year’s alone they launched 24 rockets at Sderot. They are still there. Maybe Hamas is not coming, but its rockets are.”
In Sderot there are only about 5,000 residents left, who are not seen on the streets. Only about a hundred have returned. “Maybe more will come back in March,” details Sasson. But he doesn’t see the de-escalation either. The police are still at the entrances. Trucks with tanks go up and down their limits. And boom! boom! it doesn’t stop “The military says there are 15 seconds to run to shelter if the alert goes off, but here it’s actually seven or eight seconds,” he adds.
And in Sderot the war is still very present. You can hear it from afar. And it can be seen up close in the houses in the neighborhoods closest to the border with Gaza and their windows with the remains of the fire with which it arrived on October 7.
In Sderot sometimes you hear a lost voice in the distance in a building. “No people,” says a neighbor who runs something similar to a now closed bar. And he disappears. Shimon, a taxi driver, waits for another neighbor a little further ahead and confirms that “people are still outside. The situation is still dangerous. I come and go. It’s my job”. And he offers his service without success. A few meters ahead, a business has three gunshot holes in its window. It looks abandoned. It is a new memory of what their neighbors still do not want to relive.
In a nearby park is Lawrence, alone. He relates that he works in the industrial side of the city and that a colleague of his, Dima, of Russian origin, died in the Hamas attack. That he lived in neighboring Ashkelon. And that he died while getting into the car: they shot him on the way home on the highway.
And again, in the background, boom! boom!, at which Lawrence doesn’t even flinch. “I’m close to the shelters,” he defends himself.
2.5 kilometers from the strip, in Sderot, flat green fields rule while cacti frame the path to the city. 2.5 kilometers from Gaza, the shelters are the protagonists with their thick reinforced concrete, many painted in a childish way because they are in public parks and children’s play areas, although now there are no children. 2.5 kilometers from Gaza, the de-escalation is neither noticed nor expected. And the fact that Egypt has withdrawn as a mediator to achieve a new ceasefire hardly matters. And that ultra ministers of Beniamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government (such as Security and Finance) propose depopulating the Palestinian enclave to make it possible for the settlers to return is the least of their concerns.
There are no trains in Sderot “because it is too close to Gaza,” it is explained. And even the bus is scarce, which forces us to make many interchanges in the middle of several roads and assume that the driver wants to finish his work in this area of ??Israel as soon as possible, between beeps, overtaking and grunts.
The many reservists who get on the same intercity bus to leave the city summarize well that the war continues here, it does not de-escalate, it is normality, and no one believes that it will change soon.