Livewire - Amnesty International blogging for human rights

28 January 2009: We read in the news that a home-made rocket was fired from Gaza to southern Israel by Palestinian fighters this morning, but it didn’t fall near any people. We saw yesterday at Sderot and Ashkelon police stations what these rockets – among them Qassems, Grads, Quds – look like: they are very crude, rusty 60, 90, or 120mm pipes about 1.5 metres long with fins welded onto them.

They can hold about five kilograms of explosives as well as shrapnel in the form of nails, bolts, or round metal sheets which rip into pieces on impact. They have a range of up to 20km, but cannot be aimed accurately. Anybody with some basic chemicals and scrap metal can make them. One can readily get a sense of why these rockets are inherently indiscriminate.

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