The news today is that Israel fired missiles into Gaza to kill Mubarak al-Hassanat, a top-ranking Hamas member directly involved with firing Hamas’ homemade Kassan rockets into southern Israel. Hamas has been firing the anti-personnel rockets into Israeli towns and countryside with regularity for years. I went to Israel on Oct. 15 and returned just tonight. Two days ago I visited the town of Sederot (sometimes spelled Sderot) and nearby Ashkelon. Sederot is a little more than a kilometer from Gaza:

That’s me standing on the southern edge of Sederot. Gaza is only a few hundred meters on the other side of the tree line behind me. Six rockets fell on Sederot a few hours before we arrived. Here are the remains of three of them.

There is a large rack of exploded rockets outside the town’s police station. They have a diagram explaining how the rockets are made.

These are purely anti-personnel rockets. They lack the explosive power to penetrate reinforced buildings. The warhead section is loaded with pellets or small ball bearings intended to do nothing but shred flesh, propelled by only a couple of pounds of high explosive. However, if they do hit an ordinary building (as a rocket did this week) they can damage it substantially:

Israel has tethered three blimps around the northern perimeter of Gaza with automated warning sensors and systems.

The town official who showed us around said it is optically based. When a launch is detected, every warning speaker in the town - there are a lot of warning speakers - announces “red dawn” over and over. Townspeople have only 20 seconds to seek shelter before the rockets hit. The town continues to build shelters such as this one:

On Oct. 22, I took a video of the rack of recovered detonated rockets. This rack shows only six months worth of rockets launched. People in Sederot and surrounding areas have died from these attacks, including children. While “only” six rockets fell the day I was there, 20 were launched against Israeli civilians on Oct. 23, and six more the day after that.

In light of the recent rounds of rocket attacks, Israel is considering sanctions against Gaza in addition to selectively targeting Hamas officials responsible for the attacks.

A committee headed by Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai has recommended that electricity supplied by Israel be cut off to northern Gaza during certain evening and nighttime hours. The city of Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, and environs, comprise the area from which most of the Kassam rockets are fired. The committee also recommends cutting down Israel’s supply of fuel and goods to Gaza.

“We have no alternative other than to employ these measures,” Deputy Minister Vilnai explained Thursday on Army Radio. “The situation cannot continue in which we supply the Palestinians with all their needs as usual while they fire at us. Gaza is a hostile entity, and this is a gradual disengagement.”

Some 62.5 percent of Gaza’s electricity, and all of Gaza’s fuel, including diesel, gasoline and natural gas, comes from Israel. Another 28.6 percent of Gaza’s electricity comes from Gaza’s power plant, which depends on Israeli fuel.

Before this latest round of rocket attacks, Israeli officials told my group that since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza last year, all humanitarian supplies provided to the Gazans have been provided by Israel, except four truckloads that came from Jordan.

Hamas, of course, has explicitly stated that its goal is the destruction of the state of Israel. After the disengagement from Gaza by Israel, the Gazans elected Hamas to rule them. This was less a vote for Hamas than and electoral rebellion against the Palestinian Authority, whose corruption under Yasser Arafat was so complete that after Arafat died, his successors in the PA were forced to campaign against his legacy as much as against Hamas. Fighting broke out between Hamas and the PA, which the PA lost. There is now no PA component to Gaza’s political life.

My group - nine other Methodist ministers, plus one Catholic nun and a Presbyterian pastor - also spent some time inside Palestinian-controlled territories in the West Bank talking to Palestinian figures. More to come. (Linked at OTB’s Traffic Jam.)