September 26, 2007: Israel is
implementing another lesson learned from the 2006 border war with Hizbollah.
The Israeli Army has set up a web site (http://www.oref.org.il/) to keep
civilians informed in wartime. The content is available in Hebrew, Arabic and
English. In peacetime, the site contains a lot of useful information on things
you can do to prepare for a war time environment. In wartime, the site would
provide more information on expected rocket or terrorist attacks. This would be
the same information released to the mass media, but would be presented in a
way to be most helpful to concerned civilians. The mass media usually edits the
material it gets from the military, and the information is sometimes garbled in
the process.
During the 2006 campaign, many
civilians in the combat zone (where the Hizbollah rockets were falling),
complained about the lack of accurate and useful information. This new site
will attempt to remedy that. For the moment, alerts are being provided for
Hamas rocket attacks in the south, and, as needed, alerts for terrorist
(suicide bomber) attacks coming out of the West Bank.
