“I bet whatever you want that Hamas will benefit from this ceasefire”: dubious IDF soldiers in Sderot. From the Givat Kobi viewpoint in Sderot, you can clearly see Beit Hanoun, two kilometers away as the crow flies. With the naked eye you can even see the dusty heaps of destroyed buildings. A cloud of black smoke is still rising from one of them. The two warring parties wanted to have the last word: until 7:15 a.m. local time, a quarter of an hour after the theoretical start of the ceasefire, we heard heavy Israeli artillery fire and rocket alarms from Hamas. Then we were finally able to concentrate on the chirping of the birds – the drones humming in the background goes on forever.
Elad and his infantry unit take a coffee break at the HaArba’a (“The Four”) memorial, which commemorates four soldiers killed by Hamas in a cross-border tunnel attack in 2014. I bet whatever you want, Hamas will take advantage of this ceasefire to try to kill a few soldiers,” said the sporty thirty-year-old from a small village between Gaza and Hebron. One of his comrades tries to observe the gang with a tourist telescope – it is broken. They left Gaza yesterday and don’t want to go back, but there will be no choice. “The war continues,” Arabic-speaking IDF spokesman Avichay Adraee said Friday morning, warning Gazans who had sought refuge in the south of the Strip not to return to the north. By our correspondent in Israel, Nicolas Rouger.