Saturday started very early. We left Tiberias by bus at 05:45, arriving in Kyriat Shmona about an hour later. The station commander gave the morning briefing to the soldiers and assigned everyone their roles. I waited close to 45 minutes until he finished and everyone was dispatched before approaching him once things were quiet. It turns out they had all the resources they needed, and he didn’t have much for me to do. I’m against using resources that aren’t needed, so I elected not to go to the lookout after hearing it was fully staffed. I just sat around the station for a while.
Soon enough, I saw an officer with a camera getting into a jeep and heard him mention he was going to photograph some rocket landing sites. He had no problem with my coming, so we drove around town a bit, seeing some stunning views and also seeing the damage that the rockets have done to the town.
We examined an apartment that received a direct hit from a kyatusha rocket. When I saw a crib in the next room, I was scared that an infant may have been hurt, but the guard at the apartment told us that the family was not home. (It turns out they only left for an hour and hadn’t moved South as I’d thought at first.)
From there we saw countless cars & houses that were damaged by rockets. We passed open fields that were blackended by fires. Most stunning was the emptiness. The city has been turned into a ghost town by the constant barrage of rockets. I can’t imagine how long it will take the town to recover, both in terms of the building repairs, but also economically from the past month.
The morale of the local police was high, and that was very nice to see given what they’ve had to endure.
After the tour, I spent much of the rest of the day at the police station. I was there in the afternoon when the rockets came, and we had to rush into the shelters. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have spent the last month living in a concrete room. What I saw in one day was only the tip…just enough to give me an understanding of how much those living in the center of the country don’t have an understanding of the scope of what those in the North are going through.
I managed to find a ride back to Afula around 5pm and made it in time for a birthday party. Back to “normal”.
[tags]Israel, Lebanon, war, MidEast, Middle-East, KyriatShmona[/tags]
