A Palestinian missile fired from the northern Gaza Strip slammed into Ashkelon, Israel’s Chutzot Shopping Mall Wednesday evening, injuring 40 people. About 15 of the wounded were children, most of them patients of a health clinic on the mall’s second floor.
“This was a direct hit,” stated Rabbi Menachem Mendel Lieberman, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Ashkelon, who immediately sent fellow emissaries to area hospitals to check in on the welfare of the victims and their families. “Unfortunately, this mall is a place with a lot of people.”
Early news reports indicated that a Grad missile was responsible for the destruction, as opposed to the crudely designed Kassam rockets that have terrorized the community of Sderot. Officials speculated that terrorists were trying to disrupt the visit of U.S. President George W. Bush, who arrived in Jerusalem on a state visit with 80 leaders of America’s Jewish community Wednesday morning.
That a mall was targeted was no accident, asserted Lieberman.
Government personnel appeared to agree with him, pointing out that the highly-accurate Grad missiles are believed to be manufactured in Iran.
“We will not be able to tolerate continuous attacks on innocent civilians,” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told The Jerusalem Post.
Lieberman said that Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries dispatched to the hospitals “spent a lot of time trying to cheer up the children.”
Meanwhile, he spent much of the night in consultation with colleagues on how best to ensure the safety of children in Ashkelon’s schools, several of which are operated by Chabad-Lubavitch.
“What we need to do now is to think about how we can protect our children,” he said.
The rabbi added that the Lubavitch boys’ school was running a fundraising drive to better shield its building from damage in a missile attack. He said that administrators hope to raise a total of NIS 250,000.
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