Philip Weiss writes: There is a famous knoll outside Sderot in southern Israel where reporters and other spectators of war gather to watch Israeli operations against Gaza—“we want to see fireworks,” as one young man explained this afternoon– and we had been there only ten minutes when Micky Rosenfeld, an Israeli police spokesperson on security matters, arrived with a colleague.

“There’s a strike, check it out,” he said proudly as a plume of smoke rose from Gaza City. “You can see it well in the setting sun.”

Around us, photographers balanced long telephoto lenses on knees or tripods to make the golden shot of destruction about a dozen miles away. Four men seated under a fir tree guzzled bottles of beer.

Then Rosenfeld spoke with controlled anger about a possible Israeli invasion of the strip if Gazan rocket attacks persist. “It won’t be for two days… It could be two weeks. It could be a month. It could be two months. It is not going to be like last time.”

And my colleague Allison Deger reports that when she asked Rosenfeld about Gaza hitting Tel Aviv with rockets, he was even more emphatic: “If they dare to strike Tel Aviv… we’ll wipe the whole place out.”