SDEROT, Israel — Former Mayor Eli Moyal still recalls the first time a rocket landed in Sderot. He was almost certainly one of the first Israeli citizens to experience a rocket fired from Gaza landing in his town.

One day, he was sitting on his porch, reading the newspaper. “I remember it like it was yesterday,” Moyal told Al-Monitor July 10. ''It was April 16, 2001. I was sitting there, smoking a cigarette and taking in the sunset. Suddenly, I heard loud noises. At first, I didn’t pay much attention to this. There was one boom after another, and smoke billowing up. You have to remember that back then, no one imagined that missiles would ever strike Israeli towns. But then a few policemen came to tell me that missiles had fallen on Sderot. I was stunned. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked them, and they told me that they were. That’s how it all began.”

Since then, about 9,000 rockets of all types have hit Sderot, all fired from Gaza. At first, the whole country was shocked and the local residents anxious. Over time it became a fairly routine occurrence for people living in the south. On two separate occasions in the past few years, Israel has tried to put an end to the rocket fire. It poured troops into Gaza with the explicit purpose of attacking Hamas and eliminating its rocket launchers. Each time, the mission failed.

This may be the third round between Israel and Gaza, but it is different from the previous ones. Throughout its long conflict with the Palestinians, Israel as a whole never became a target for rockets fired relentlessly from Gaza. Now, however, there is hardly a town that hasn’t heard the crash of a missile landing or heard the air-raid sirens.