7 days ago
'The best show in town': From a hilltop in Israel, observers have a sinister view of Gaza bombings
Between two bombardments, Liram, Afik, and Emmanuel passed around a joint. On Thursday, July 17, at 6:30 pm, as on most evenings, the three friends, 27-year-old Israelis who preferred not to share their last names, met at the top of Kobi Hill, the highest point overlooking the city of Sderot on the edge of the Gaza Strip, to talk about work, travel, and "stock market investments," they listed. Right across from them, about one kilometer away, past the highway, a few fields, and a separation barrier, lay Beit Hanoun and the north of the Gaza Strip, which has been bombarded without pause for nearly two years.
"When I see and hear a missile fall on Gaza, I am happy," Afik said, grinning in his shorts and brightly colored T-shirt, his pack of cigarettes and phone in front of him. On his device screen, the watch shop manager showed a photo of Avi Megira, his uncle, killed on his motorcycle in the streets of Sderot by a Hamas member during the massacres of October 7.
Facing his two friends, a trader and an employee at the large printing plant in Kibbutz Be'eri, adjacent to the Gaza Strip, the young man, "frightened" by the proximity of the border with the Palestinian enclave, said he believed that freeing the last 50 Israeli hostages, of whom only about 20 are thought to be alive, could only happen through a violent military operation. Even if "millions" of Palestinians must die, he added. According to the latest figures shared by NGOs and international organizations on the ground, more than 58,000 people, the majority of them civilians, have already been killed by the Israeli army since October 7.
