Stream of rockets wears on Israeli town

The rockets are homemade and inaccurate, especially by comparison with the deadly high-tech weaponry Israel deploys to suppress the attacks. But they have killed 12 people in Sderot and neighboring villages over the past six years, wounded dozens more, and caused millions of dollars in damage.

Residents say the worst part of their disrupted lives is the constant fear - never knowing where the next rocket will fall. "I am falling apart, it is killing me, it is killing my family," says Shulamit Sasson, 44.

Her family of seven sleeps side by side on mattresses on their living room floor, to be close to a makeshift bomb shelter. Her 13-year-old son wets himself each time he hears public loudspeakers blare "tseva adom" - "color red" - meaning a rocket will arrive in less than a minute.

This month a rocket landed next to the family's home, blasting away the windows and filling it with a cloud of smoke. Sasson said she spent five days in the hospital with trauma.

The Israel Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War, a nonprofit group that works with Tel Aviv University, says it polled 500 adults in the town of 24,000 in July and found that 91.9 percent had witnessed a rocket landing near them, and 48.4 percent in the closely knit community know someone who was killed. As a result, 28.4 percent of adults over age 18 have severe forms of post-traumatic stress disorder, it said.

"These are not people who are simply feeling bad. In the middle of the night they are woken up by their own thoughts, by their own fears, by the memory of these fears," said Marc Gelkopf, who conducted the phone survey.

Sasson said that four years ago a rocket landed near her son, Raziel, then 9, inside a schoolyard and sent him into shock. She says she hasn't worked since, and Raziel has never recovered.