All is not quiet on the southern front

There has been so little international media coverage of Sderot so it is easy to assume all is quiet on the southern home front. Ynet News reports six kassams fell this morning:

Palestinian gunmen fired six Qassam rockets at the town of Sderot and the western Negev communities on Monday morning, following a number of relatively quiet days in southern Israel. The rockets landed in open areas, and there were no reports of injuries or damage. The al-Quds Brigades, the Islamic Jihad's military wing, claimed responsibility for firing the rockets.

The Qassams were launched while children were making their way to schools and kindergartens. Due to the state of emergency in the area, the children are traveling in fortified buses. The Sderot parents committee demanded that the Education Ministry keep its promise to hold Monday's civics matriculation exam outside the city.

Batya Katar, chairman of the committee, told Ynet, "In spite of the recent relative calm, many students still fail to come to school. There are classes which are only attended by four or five students." Katar added that many students said that were unable to study for their matriculation exams inside Sderot due to the situation. "This calm is a very relative calm, and we knew that it would be followed by additional Qassam rockets," she said.

I won't hold my breath waiting for any condemnation of Palestinians terrorists, but imagine the sound level if the IDF deliberately attempted to fire rockets on busloads of Palestinian school children.

But all is not well within the Palestinian Authority either. Apparently, 92% of the Palestinian population is suffering from either depression or related anxiety caused by the in-fighting among terror groups reports Ynet News.

Ninety-two percent of Palestinians suffer from depression-related anxiety, caused by despair over violence between Hamas and Fatah gunmen and the apparent demise of the Palestinian unity government, according to a poll published by the Washington Times on Monday morning.

Jamil Rabah, the director of Ramallah-based Near East Consulting, polled 801 Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem for the latest survey, which has a margin of error of 3.4 percent.

The poll was taken last month, following a deadly flare-up between Hamas and Fatah gunmen that left dozens dead in Gaza and laid bare a dysfunctional unity government. The unrest cuts across region, political affiliation and social class, according to the poll findings. "The higher the level of depression, or discontent, the higher this score comes out, the higher the social fragmentation of society," Rabah told the Washington Times. The data constitute a jump of 15 percent compared with a poll conducted in October and more than double the level from November 2005.

Palestinians should take this to heart rather than prozac; the Egyptians have mediated another successful ceasefire between Hamas and Fatah.