SDEROT, Israel—Sderot’s mayor, Alon Davidi, calls his city the most heavily rocketed in the world.
Less than a mile from the Gaza Strip, the city of 38,000 people has experienced constant rocket attacks from Hamas. These attacks have occurred not just on or since Oct. 7, 2023, but for 23 years, even before Israel unilaterally pulled out of the Gaza Strip in 2005 in an unsuccessful attempt to make peace.
Mr. Davidi says he has seven children, ranging in age from 12 to 26.
“Most of my children were born into this situation,” he told The Epoch Times. “They need to hide every time the sirens come. I think that they’ve been under this situation more than 12,000 times. This is a number that you cannot find anywhere in the world.”
City officials estimate that hundreds, perhaps a thousand, rockets were fired at Sderot during the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023.
Yaron Zohar, director of the city’s civilian services center, told The Epoch Times that terrorists raided the city early that Saturday morning, killing 47 people and taking one hostage.
They attacked and occupied the police station in a pitched battle. When the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) finally arrived on the scene, it took them nearly 25 hours to retake it. The building was so severely damaged that the city had to demolish it.
The IDF eliminated terrorists from the city by the next day, but the surrounding area and nearby roads remained unsafe for almost a week, delaying the evacuation of residents who wanted to flee.
Much of the city was without water and power. This meant that once their phone batteries died, besieged residents couldn’t recharge their devices and let their families know where they were.
The fighting at the police station, which opened with the terrorists firing a rocket-propelled grenade at it, damaged a water main.
Nearly the entire city fled.
“Oct. 7 was very hard for me,” Mr. Zohar told The Epoch Times. “My job is to make sure the city looks nice and everything works. There were (fires), cars, blood everywhere, smoke. Things that I thought I would never see.”
He and his employees watched in horror as the attack developed that day. Residents would call in because their homes were under attack or they needed assistance.
With the police station itself under attack, the city could not send police officers to respond, Mr. Zohar said.
“The first few hours were tough,” Mr. Zohar said. “At that point we had a full picture of where the terrorists are. We sent messages to civilians telling them to stay in their house, in their shelters. When the army came and police came, we started to manage the event.”
Mr. Zohar said people didn’t want to believe that “dozens of terrorists would come inside the city and butcher and murder” people. “We weren’t ready or prepared,” he said.
The lack of preparation was amplified by what he called the city’s “religious character.” It was the Jewish Sabbath when businesses and government agencies shut down.
That morning, he said, he got a call at his home in Ashdod, about a half hour away, from an employee who said rocketing had started in Sderot. That wasn’t that unusual, he said.
Then he got a call from another employee who had headed into the office, a routine procedure during such rocket attacks. She and a fellow employee only missed the terrorists by two minutes and let him know the terrorists were on the streets of Sderot.
“Very quickly, we understood this is something we are not used to,” Mr. Zohar said.
They started to get more calls, and city workers watched the attacks on the city’s security cameras. City residents began seeing terrorists on the streets.
“We lost communication with the police. The radio didn’t work. We received calls, and didn’t have anyone to respond.”
Mr. Zohar said he took a call from an 8-year-old boy who said, “They shot my father in the window. He’s dead and I’m alone with them.”
He took another call from a mother, who whispered that terrorists were inside her house. “At that moment, the only thing I could say was, (keep still) and be quiet. All the police officers still alive were fighting at the police station. And the army wasn’t here.”
Power went out when a rocket hit an electric pole. Access to water was lost too when fighting at the police station destroyed a water main.
He showed a reporter chilling video footage, shot by a city security camera downtown and watched by city workers as it developed, of the first terrorists entering the city, the closest town to Gaza, around 7 a.m. on Oct. 7.
Mr. Zohar has had to relive this nightmare many times in showing the video to journalists and other visitors.
‘Are You the Good Guys?’
In the footage, a family in a black car pulls over and gets out at the sound of the air raid sirens, not realizing that two cars right behind them are filled with terrorists. As they do, they flee.The father takes his 4-year-old daughter and runs to the right, while the mother takes their 6-year-old daughter and runs to the left, into some trees and out of sight.
The terrorists shoot the father. The 4-year-old wanders away from her father’s downed body.
“How alone she must have felt,” Mr. Zohar said. They later learned the father was not dead and had told the 4-year-old daughter to go find her mother and sister.
Another driver came by in a gray car and was shot by the terrorists. As the little girl walked away, another vehicle passed her. It had Israeli license tags but was filled with terrorists who had stolen it from someone they had murdered. They were headed for the police station.
The family was relieved when a police officer, heading to the station for a shift change—something the terrorists knew while planning their attack, Mr. Zohar said—came by. He and a Bedouin city employee took charge of the family, one taking the mother and children, the other taking the wounded father.
The police officer didn’t yet know that his station was under attack. He, the city employee, the mother, and the father were all subsequently murdered there. Further footage from the police station shows the mother being fatally shot at close range.
Only the two children, now orphans, survived. They were screaming in the car, and they were rescued by a security officer. The older one asked him, “Are you the good guys?”
Religious and conservative, the city was founded in 1951 to house Jewish immigrants and refugees from Middle Eastern countries like Morocco, Kurdistan, and Iran. By the 1961 census, 87 percent of its population came from North Africa.
Its growth continued to the present day, despite the constant rocket attacks since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip after Israel’s unilateral 2005 withdrawal.
The mayor said the city had built 6,000 new apartments in the ten years before the attack, with another 7,000 in various phases of construction. Companies want to resume building but lack workers. Efforts are underway to bring in workers from Moldova, India, and China, but not from Palestine.
He envisions the city growing to 70,000 people within the next five years, he said.
By early March, most residents had returned, and schools had just reopened. By May, more than 90 percent of people were back, Mr. Zohar later told The Epoch Times in a text message. More of the city was back to normal. A large stockpile of essential items was kept outside on a covered basketball court. There were still some items left, but stocks were being depleted, he said.
One thing that helped the city recover was the government’s carrot-and-stick approach, using tax discounts and a program that reimbursed owners for property damage from terrorist or rocket attacks, Mr. Zohar explained. The government agreed to provide total compensation if they returned by March 7. However, if they came later, they would only receive 50 percent, he said.
‘We Won’t be Afraid’
Mr. Davidi said many people were willing to return because of the city’s strong sense of community, reflected in good schools and summer programs.“People look at this city like it’s their home, and no one wants to leave their home,” he said.
And they also understand, Mr. Davidi said, “that it’s a battle of good against evil, against an organization that wants to make chaos all over the world. We are like the frontline in that battle,” standing for other cities and nations that would be next in the terrorists’ crosshairs if Sderot fell.
“We gave to the people of Gaza all the chances that we could give them, to change, to live (a better life.) But with all the kindness, that the countries of the world gave them a lot of money, they use all this money not to build a good future for themselves. They used it to build tunnels, and they used it to buy weapons, and to continue the terror.”
Building a wall is not enough for Israel, he said. The Gazan people need a better regime, one that wants to build a promising future for them.
To those residents who aren’t yet home, he said, “I say to them that we love them. We know that being under the most evil attack in Israel in the last 50 years is very, very tough to do. And that the municipality of Sderot continues to give them service, even if they are in Eilat, in Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv. And they can take their time and we will wait for them to decide to come home and join us and develop and to live in the city.”
Mr. Zohar said he was looking for two kinds of wins. The first would be the defeat of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The second, he said, would be when he looked at the city’s security camera screens, “not looking for suspicious persons, but looking in the park and seeing a child playing. It started not long ago, but it will take time.”
He asks a reporter to make two things clear in his story: “One, tell the truth of what really happened, and why we’re doing what we’re doing. The second, let them all know that no one will leave, we will continue being here. And we won’t be afraid. Because these are our homes and we won’t leave our homes.”
