Israeli town in trauma from Palestinian rockets

SDEROT, Israel (Reuters) - They may be reading the paper, shopping for groceries, putting the kids to bed. But when the siren sounds, the residents of this southern Israeli town drop everything and run for cover.

They have 15 seconds to reach one of the bomb shelters that dot Sderot, which lies just 1.5 km (1 mile) from the Gaza Strip and faces an almost daily barrage of Palestinian rockets. No one knows where the rockets will land.

"We are living in a war zone," said Hava Gad, a 42-year-old mother of three whose 9-year-old son is so traumatized by the constant salvoes that he refuses to sleep alone and soils himself almost daily.

Gad's hardscrabble home town, Sderot, is on the front line of the Jewish state's war with Islamist Hamas militants.

An Israeli blockade on Gaza, imposed last week after a surge of rocket fire, brought Sderot some respite while critically deepening Palestinian privation. On Wednesday, tens of thousands of Gazans stormed into neighboring Egypt to stock up on food.

Gad voices no satisfaction at the worsening crisis in Gaza, which has overshadowed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks launched last November.

Nor does she pity the Palestinian rocket crews who have menaced Sderot and other Israeli border towns for years.

"I'm sure the simple citizens of Gaza want peace like us, but the militants, they want to kill us, so yes, honestly, I want to kill them," she told Reuters.

Israel pulled troops and settlers out of Gaza in 2005 but still controls Gaza's borders with Israel. It has imposed sanctions and regularly raided the Hamas-run territory, killing hundreds of Palestinians, in a campaign to counter the rocket fire.

The rockets rarely kill or wound people in Sderot and none had fallen by late afternoon on Wednesday. But around 250 have been fired at the town in the past week, some slamming into houses, terrifying the townspeople and disrupting daily life.

BOMB SHELTERS

Sderot's streets, many of them cratered by rockets, are dotted with cream bomb shelters. Bigger concrete shelters decorated with colorful murals stand outside schools and community centers. Schools and some commercial buildings have steel roofs and many houses have a reinforced "safe room".

When a rocket is about to land, a siren sounds and a voice over the loudspeaker repeats "red alert, red alert".

Last Thursday, a rocket whistled overhead and smashed into the ground near Gad's home, shaking the building.

"My son was hyperventilating, screaming and shaking. He soiled himself. Eventually I had to call an ambulance," said Gad. "And that happens all the time. Every morning my son is wet when he wakes up."

Many Sderot residents are fleeing the town for other cities in southern Israel. Boarded-up houses are a common sight and several streets are virtually empty, even at noon on a weekday.

Isabell Almog, 28, still works in Sderot, but moved away with her husband and two young children a couple of months ago.

"A house nearby was hit and a woman was killed. My 6-year-old son just started screaming and panicking. We couldn't go on living like this, it was the breaking point," she said at a cafe on the main street, where several businesses have shut their doors for lack of business.

Idan Azulay, a 20-year-old waitress planning to quit Sderot, said its residents wanted peace, but she sounded pessimistic.

"I don't see it happening," she said. "The Palestinians want our land. We don't want to give it up," she said, referring to the whole of Israel.

For Gad, who wears a star of David around her neck, leaving Sderot is not an option.

"If I leave, they win."

(Editing by Tim Pearce)