Sderot (Shutterstock) (Shutterstock)
Sderot

‘The impact was right at the entrance of the house. The car took much of the impact,’ Sderot resident relates.

By Ben Rappaport, United with Israel

Efrat Amram, a resident of the southern Israeli city of Sderot, discussed with Israel National News how her family had narrowly avoided the impact of a rocket fired by terrorists in Gaza which hit their home on Tuesday.

She related how the attack came moments after her husband had parked the car and her two daughters had returned from school.

“The three of them entered together, we didn’t even take our daughter out of the stroller, and all of the sudden the ‘Red Alert’ sounded,” she said. “We all entered the bomb shelter together. We managed to reach it because it’s close to the entrance. Usually, we don’t make it in time because we have two floors. If someone were upstairs, he wouldn’t have had time to come down.”

“The impact was right at the entrance of the house. The car took much of the impact,” she said, adding that there was also a lot of damage to their home, with windows shattered and electrical appliances broken due to damage caused to the main power cable.

“This is really a huge miracle,” Amram concluded. “The journalists who were here didn’t agree to film it, but the Israeli flag on the vehicle remained white while the rest of the vehicle was scorched black. Thank God the kids quickly pulled themselves together, and together with the neighbors gave each other strength.”

Israel and Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip reached a ceasefire agreement in the early hours of Wednesday, following a major conflagration in which more than 100 rockets were launched towards the Jewish state in under 24 hours.

One of the rockets hit a construction site in Sderot, with the shrapnel moderately wounding a 25-year-old foreign national and lightly wounding two other foreign workers.

A 75-year-old man and a 49-year-old woman were slightly injured when they tripped on their way to a protected area. Also, several people were treated for anxiety.

Sderot is one kilometer from the Gaza border. The town’s 30,000 residents have 7-15 seconds to reach a safe room when a when a warning siren is triggered. Since 2004, thousands of rockets have landed on the city, killing 11 Israelis.

A 2022 study by the Jerusalem-based Herzog Hospital Psychotrauma Center found that 45 percent of Sderot’s children between the ages 2-6 suffer from trauma.