As the international community watches the conflict between Israel and Hamas escalate, one Stratford woman has certainly been on edge.
For Osi Rosenberg, the news coming out of Israel is much more than headlines from a world away. It’s personal.
“My mom is there right now, my cousins, my aunts, my uncles. I was born in Israel so I’m very connected.”
Rosenberg’s family lives in the suburbs surrounding central Tel Aviv– near, she fears, a large number of underground tunnels that have so far gone undetected.
Rosenberg said, “Hamas is popping up just feet away from settlements and feet away from towns feet away from villages if the military wasn’t on the boarder they would just massacre people.”
Glued to social media and Israeli newspaper feeds, worrying about her family’s safety in a different time zone has become a full time job.
“Its a 24-hour situation. When they wake up in the morning I text them everything I heard while they were sleeping and when I wake up in the morning I’m like, ‘what’s new?’ and they tell me everything that’s gone on while I was sleeping.”
Every time she sees reports of an air raid alarm near their home she’s tormented until they touch base.
“People have just 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 45 seconds to get into a bomb shelter,” Rosenberg said.
The FAA issued a ban Tuesday prohibiting U.S. airlines from landing in Tel Aviv after a Hamas rocket made it through Israel’s iron dome security system and hit near the airport. Over the past 15 days 29 Israelis and 630 Palestinians have been killed.
“My dad told me he was driving to work and had to pull over and get on the ground because of the siren, and there’s families with children shielding the children with their bodies to make sure if anything falls from the sky the kids won’t get hurt,” Rosenberg said.
As a mother herself, Rosenberg’s heart aches for people on both sides of the conflict. “It’s just horrific, it’s horrific and it’s been going on for far too long.”