In particular, one human interest item caught my eye last December. A mother in Kibbutz Nir Am, which lies between Gaza and Sderot, could not locate two of her young children when the Tzeva Adom (Color Red) alert went off, signaling the launching of a Kassam rocket by Palestinian terrorists. A few seconds later she heard a thump, and when she raced to her backyard, she found her two boys there, meters from an unexploded Kassam. It only failed to detonate because it had landed in very muddy ground thanks to earlier downpours.

I opened a part-time ZOA office in the Gaza Periphery community of Netiv Ha'asara in the hopes of drawing more media and government attention to the plight of the Gaza periphery communities. Soon after I was invited to attend a meeting at Nir Am where two highly placed security officials, Yossi Arazi and Oded Amichai, gave a compelling presentation about the Nautilus/SkyGuard laser system.

Other systems currently under consideration are beset by schedule, cost and range problems. For example, the Iron Dome system, which uses missiles to shoot down rockets, won't be ready until 2011 at the earliest and costs approximately $100,000 per threat destruction, as opposed to the $1,000-$2,000 of SkyGuard/Nautilus. This does not even take into account that Iron Dome's threat destruction probability is less than SkyGuard's, so it could take multiple shots to destroy one $500 Kassam. Add to that R&D, operational costs, current need for fortification and damages, and we end up with a system that is prohibitively expensive and does not even offer the same level of protection - not from Kassams fired in the typical four km. to six km. range; nor from mortars, which have already taken three lives; nor from artillery shells.