Targeted Israeli town wants mission accomplished

By Douglas Hamilton

SDEROT, Israel (Reuters) - The message to Israeli leaders on Monday from this little community in the firing line of Hamas rockets from the Gaza Strip was: keep it up.

"We feel good after years of disappointment. The general mood in Sderot is that people are very, very satisfied," said town information officer Shalom Halevy.

Sderot, a town of 24,000, has been targeted daily since Israel began its offensive on Islamist militants in Gaza on December 27. But it was hit by sporadic rocket attacks for eight years before the government took action.

Its most important visitor on Monday was Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who will become Israel's first woman prime minister since Golda Meir if she can defeat rightwing challenger Benjamin Netanyahu in an election now only four weeks away.

"The operation is continuing," she told Israel army radio during a visit to the town's central underground bunker where exploded Palestinian rockets are on display in a glass case, looking rather like burst drainpipes with fins.

There was no hint of any dispute with outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Political sources said he was resisting Livni's wish to declare victory an end to the offensive. But both are from the same party, so the blurred message may have been deliberate.

Livni said Hamas now had twice been taken by surprise -- by the air blitz at the start of the offensive and a week later by the entry of Israeli ground forces into Gaza.

Mixing local morale boosting with international profile building, she visited the nearby trauma center and gave interviews to major Western television networks.

Apache helicopters are never very far from the skies over Sderot, either as part of the Gaza operation or for reassurance. An occasional F-15 fighter curved low swoops on Monday.

"People here would be prepared to wait two-to-three months more if that's what it takes to finish this operation," Halevy said.

"We hope they will finish it. Fewer rockets is not enough. It has to stop totally," he said.

Israeli forces were still holding back from a threatened third stage of their deadliest assault on Palestinian militants in decades -- a push into the city of Gaza and other urban areas to add more punch to an air campaign and ground offensive.

The offensive has killed more than 900 Palestinians, about 40 percent of them civilians, according to Gaza health officials.

Gaza's fighters may be hunkered down and their rate of rocket attacks is slowly dropping. But it is not stopping.

On Monday, before Livni's visit, two rockets exploded in Sderot. The Israelis call them "Qassams" after the armed wing of Hamas, and an enterprising Sderot kebab seller offers a weighty sandwich by the same name.