The Supreme Court Rejects Sderot Residents’ Plea

The citizens of Sderot are not privileged to one moment’s rest.

The Supreme Court rejected, on Monday, the plea of approximately thirty Sderot residents to force the government to provide protection for 800 private.

The defense budget will include such expenses beginning in 2009. And if this is not enough, on April 15, two bomb shelters located at 1 Histadrut Street were removed from Sderot. These shelters belong to Magen David Adom, but MDA moved to a new cite that was officially inaugurated at the end of March, and they no longer need these shelters. Those particular bomb shelters were located next to the central supermarket and various stores and served many residence of the city during Qassam rocket attacks. During Tzeva Adom alerts, any number of residents could be found seeking cover in them.

Yaakov Dahan, one of the owners of the Super Dahan supermarket located near the removed shelters, said that during Tzeva warnings, workers and customers would hurry to those shelters. Now it is unclear where they can find cover within the 15 seconds they once the alert sounds.

According to the driver of the crane, the shelters are scheduled to move Azor and Yehud. When asked why these shelters were removed from their current location, the spokesperson for the Magen David Adom claimed that they are private equipment and MDA is not responsible for providing bomb shelters for the citizens of Sderot; he referred us to the municipality.

In response to our questioning, they municipality responded, “If the shelters are theirs (MDA), who are we to say where they should put them. In the event that there is a shortage of shelters, we as the municipality, will turn to the Home Front Command and when we get a response, we’ll get back to you.” We were unable to get a comment from the Home Front Command.

The past few days have been relatively quiet but the problem of Qassam fire on Sderot and the western Negev has not been solved. Perhaps the Qassam threat has moved to Azor and Yehud. At least if this were the case, it would answer the question of why bomb shelters are being taken away from Sderot when more than 5,600 hundred homes remain unprotected