In Sderot, an Israeli city just 2.5 kilometers from Gaza, the only sound you hear when you walk the streets is that of 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 the streets only amplifies it.
The Government of 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 communicates at the same time that hundreds of reservists fighting in the strip will return to their civilian lives sooner or later.
De-escalation in Gaza while the war tension with Iran, with Hizbullah in Lebanon and the West Bank increases?
In Sderot, on the border with the Palestinian enclave, in the largest city bordering Gaza, no one believes in a de-escalation. Because nothing on the ground indicates this and because after three months of war here people continue to live as if on another planet, the same one that has been drawn full of astronauts and far from Earth on the vaulted ceiling of their Town Hall.
In fact, there is no one and no one is intuited in this city full of low-rise developments and stopped works that before October 7 housed around 30,000 people. The houses are closed and barred. Cars can be counted on the fingers of one hand. And in the streets the dogs are the masters: when a stranger passes by, they set off to mark the territory.
The Israel Defense Forces repeat that they have most of northern Gaza under control. That their efforts are now focused on the center and south of the strip, where the leaders of Hamas are believed to be, and that is why it is in these areas that most of the victims have been concentrated in recent days, that in total are already more than 22,000. Especially in Khan Iunis and.
But in Sderot, facing northern Gaza, nothing changes and no one returns.
There is no one in Sderot, and a young man next to the City Hall who has run out of battery in his electric car explains that the local authorities have even thought it appropriate to pay in order to encourage them to return. But he doesn’t come back.
“There’s only the mayor and the technicians,” he says, pointing to the City Council.
Yaron Sasson, the municipal spokesman, who receives La Vanguardia in a room of the Consistory that looks like a bunker, argues it like this: “People expect to return, but they don’t want to return because they want security and now there is none. In the New Year alone, they launched 24 rockets against Sderot. They are still there. Maybe Hamas is not coming, but their rockets are.”
There are only about 5,000 residents left in Sderot, who cannot be seen on the streets. Only about 100 have returned. “Perhaps more will return in March,” explains Sasson. But he doesn’t see the de-escalation either. The police are still at the entrances. Trucks with tanks go up and down the city limits. And the boom!, boom! doesn’t stop “The army says there are 15 seconds to run to a shelter if the alert sounds, but here it’s actually seven or eight seconds,” he adds.
And the war is still very present in Sderot. It feels far away. And it can be seen up close in the houses of the neighborhoods closest to the border with Gaza and their windows with the remains of the fire that arrived last October 7.
In Sderot you sometimes hear a voice lost in the distance in some building. “No people” [There are no people], says a neighbor who runs something similar to a bar, now closed. And it disappears. Shimon, a taxi driver, waits for another neighbor a little further on 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 further on, a shop has three bullet holes in the window. It looks abandoned. It is a new memory of what its neighbors still do not want to relive.
In a nearby park is Lawrence, alone. He says 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 lived in neighboring Ascaló. And that he died when he took the car: he was shot on the way home on the road.
And, once again, in the background, boom!, boom!, a sound that Lawrence doesn’t even flinch at. “I’m close to the shelters”, he defends himself.
2.5 kilometers from the strip, in Sderot, green, flat fields dominate and cacti frame the road 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 play areas for children, even if there are no children now. At 2.5 kilometers from Gaza, the de-escalation is neither noticeable nor expected. And the fact that Egypt has withdrawn as a mediator to achieve a new ceasefire barely affects. And that extreme ministers of Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government (such as those of Security and Finance) propose to depopulate the Palestinian enclave to allow the settlers to return is the last of their concerns.
There are no trains in Sderot “because it is too close to Gaza”, he explains. And even the bus is in short supply, forcing many interchanges in the middle of various roads and assuming that the driver wants to finish his work in this part of Israel as soon as possible, amid whistles, overtaking and grunts.
The many reservists who get on the same intercity bus to leave the city sum it up well: that the war continues, without de-escalation, is the norm, and no one thinks that will change anytime soon.
