To the Editor,

Imagine: you’re sitting in class when air raid sirens suddenly blare and everyone begins running. You have one minute to find cover before a missile strikes. Upon finding shelter, you spend the remaining seconds wondering if your friends and family have also made it to relative safety. Then you pray to hear the “boom,” because if you hear it, it means you’re still alive.

Reality: Living in Tel Aviv, Israel, this is what I’ve now experienced daily. Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist groups have spent the last decade launching thousands of rockets and missiles at Israeli cities, causing death, destruction and terror for millions of Israeli civilians. Who could blame a country for defending itself after even one missile is fired on its civilians? Yet Israel has endured the torture of up to 100 rockets a day.

U.S. media coverage has been equating the conflict as two sides trading attacks, yet this couldn’t be further from the truth. While Gazan rockets are indiscriminately fired on civilian towns, Israel responds with precision, surgical strikes used to eliminate weapons caches and terrorist infrastructure, while minimizing civilian casualties. Israel even drops millions of leaflets with life-saving instructions warning Gazan civilians to leave areas ahead of military operations and avoid terrorist locations. Yet here in Tel Aviv, when the sirens go off, I have mere seconds to find cover and wait for the “boom.” Grimly, perhaps Hamas leader Fathi Hammad put it best, saying, “We desire death like you [Israelis] desire life.”

Micah Toll

Pitt Graduate, Class of 2012