(Photo: Gil Cohen-Magen Gil / AFP)
By Melanie Lidman - August 19, 2022
On Friday, August 5, Liudmyla Matrenin walked down the street in Ashdod to borrow some eggs from her friend. Both women are Ukrainian refugees, living in the coastal southern Israeli city for the last few months after escaping the fighting that broke out back home in February.
“I was walking to her house, and I remember I looked up into the sky, and I saw something that looked like a firework,” Matrenin recalled. “But then I thought, why would there be fireworks during the day?”
It was the start of Operation Breaking Dawn, a 66-hour operation in Gaza during which more than 1,100 rockets were fired toward Israel. The Hamas-run health ministry in the Gaza Strip said 49 people were killed there, though Israel claims at least 16 of those deaths resulted from failed rockets fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group that fell inside the Strip.
Read More: Times of Israel