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| Friday 3rd of September 2010 |
24 Elul 5770
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Filmmaker tackles Sderot Qassams |
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By DAVID GORDON
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Friday, 11 November 2005 |
 Coty Malka’s daughter, Taeer, is afraid to walk to school.
After seeing a small story in an Israeli newspaper about Sderot’s Qassam threats, Toronto filmmaker Igal Hecht was outraged. “What really angered me was what happened on Sept. 30 in 2004. Two young kids were killed at once,” he says. His response was to make a documentary about the city and how it copes with constant missile attacks.
Two weeks later, Hecht found himself in the city of 20,000, among its people, its destroyed homes and its streets. Hecht began interviewing people like Coty, a mother of a kindergarten-aged girl, both of whose lives are lived in fear.
“These are people who lost friends and families… Sderot and the surrounding area have been hit by more than a thousand Qassams in the past year,” Hecht says. “The media will do documentaries and reports on checkpoints, suicide bombs and Gaza, but nothing in Sderot. Filmmakers rush to film Palestinians suffering, but they don’t care about Israelis.”
Qassam is about the city of Sderot and the lives of those who are affected by the attacks. Filmed three weeks after the murder of the two preschoolers, Qassam looks at the uncertainty of daily life that has plagued the city in the last two years.
“Qassams are just as deadly as suicide bombers, packed with nails and shrapnel, to inflict as much injury and death as possible,” Hecht says. “The ‘ideal time’ to send is between 7:30 a.m. and 8:15 a.m., when parents are walking their children to school.”
One family in the film saw first-hand horror during Sukkot last year, when a Qassam hit their sukkah directly, killing two-year-old Yuval Ababe and four-year- old Dorit Insu.
“Imagine being bombarded by missiles every other day. The government is supposed to provide basic security, but this is three years of being ignored by the government. They sit idly by while missiles rain down on a city,” says Hecht. “If this was Tel Aviv, they’d be shaking the world.”
To date, very little has been done for the people of Sderot. Coming off the heels of a city-wide protest that garnered publicity and obligatory political photo- ops, the military eventually retaliated against the attacks by killing one of the chief Qassam makers.
A “red dawn” alarm system was supposed to have been installed by officials. “Of course,” Hecht says, “it tells them 20 minutes after the missiles hit.”
According to Hecht, the city has no funding for ambulances, they have a part-time bomb expert on rotation, and just three “dilapidated” fire trucks. One child died, he says, because the ambulance was 20 minutes late – it had to come from Ashkelon, 15 minutes out of the way.
Since its establishment six years ago, Hecht’s film company, Chutzpa Productions, has had films in festivals worldwide on a yearly basis, many dealing with Israeli and Jewish themes.
Qassam will be shown on Toronto’s CTS show Israel Today (Channel 9) on Nov. 20 at 9 p.m. It will include a short interview with Hecht
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