Daily life in the small Israeli town of Sderot is fraught with fear and terror. For the past several years, Hamas rockets have regularly, indiscriminately dropped on the town, damaging buildings and infrastructure, injuring and killing men, women and children. Some 2,000 rockets have fallen just since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in August of 2005. Residents have a jarring 15 seconds to take cover once the alarm sounds of another Qassam attack.

On Monday morning, a rocket exploded adjacent to a children’s day-care center, sending 12 young Sderot children to hospital for shock treatment. This was just one of seven rockets fired at Sderot that morning.

As with the other hundreds of rocket attacks that have slammed Sderot almost daily over the past year, Israel responded with ground and air strikes aimed only at destroying the rocket-launching squads, which are highly mobile and often shielded by civilians. It did nothing to destroy the terrorists’ actual capability to launch rockets into Israel; this appears to be something the Israeli administration is prepared to let go by.

In addition to Israel’s routine military response to the rockets, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert saw fit to remind Palestinian citizens that they have paid a heavy price in the past due to this particular form of terrorism, and warned that they would again in the future.

“[W]e will not come to terms with [the continuing rocket attacks], and we will not let it go by,” he said.

Olmert further stated that the government “will do everything possible to provide better security” for the people of Sderot. However, for all his bluster, he did not mention how Israel would achieve that goal.

In fact, the same day, in two separate statements, Israeli officials said Israel would not escalate its military response to the attacks. Olmert said Israel’s current policy of restricting the Israeli armed forces to largely ineffective retaliatory strikes—a policy that is clearly effecting little deterrence—would not change.

The statements essentially doomed Sderot to its hellish status quo. Residents will just have to accept the idea that missiles could blast apart their homes, the corner market, or the basketball court down the street at any time.

In the meantime, Israeli leaders will take the bold step of asking someone else to come and fight their battles for them. In what will surely prove to be a fruitless request, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations said he will ask for the UN to intervene.

“Israel plans to file an official complaint with the United Nations over the frequent terrorist rocket attacks on the western Negev,” Voice of Israel Radio reported (IsraelNN.com, September 3).

This appears to be the Israeli government’s best hope for Sderot.

Besides having repeatedly proven itself corrupt and largely incompetent, the United Nations is comprised of many Islamic nations that vehemently oppose Israel’s right to exist. For these and other reasons, the UN has done a poor job of preventing violence against Israel in the past. It is not clear how petitioning the organization might be more effective this time.

For the working-class residents of Sderot, any help from the UN will probably be too little, too late. The town is more likely to become rubble than the UN is to take meaningful action.

For Israel, Olmert’s empty promises and deadly inaction, along with pleas to the UN, clearly demonstrate his lack of will to defend not only the rule of law, but also his own people.