ZOHAR Avitan doesn't go to the bathroom unless his shoes are pointing in the right direction.

With bombs raining down on the Israeli city of Sderot, he needs to be able to run out of the door at a moment's notice.

That's the harsh reality of everyday life for people there, with everyone using a Red Alert phone app that gives 10 second warnings of targeted rocket attacks.

Mr Avitan, 64, is a manager at Sapir College just outside the city. He was forced to shut students out of the institution on the orders of the Israeli army. The college’s halls of residence are metres from a bakery which was destroyed.

He said: “You’re always walking around with an unpleasant feeling. It’s a way of life.

"It’s very hard because we don’t know when the missiles are going to be shot and where they’re going to fall.

“One time when I was abroad, I heard a noise which reminded me of the noise from the siren and I ran.

“I don’t go to the bathroom unless my shoes are facing the right way so that I can jump into them in order to run.

“I am old enough to deal with it, but some people can’t deal with the problem, including young children. There is a lot of pressure on young kids. Many of them don’t know anything else. They were born into the situation.”

When I visited Sderot almost 500 rockets were fired on civilian targets, including family homes and high street shops. It was a ghost town.

Schools, colleges and businesses were forced to close, and citizens cowered in bomb shelters.

Every home in Sderot has a bomb shelter and every citizen has the ‘Red Alert’ mobile phone app which gives ten to 40 second warnings of targeted rocket attacks (depending on how close you live to the border).

Avitan’s home in Sderot was hit by a rocket fired from Gaza recently and he admitted he only survived because his wife insisted they retreat to a bomb shelter.

He said: “There was an explosion at my house and my son’s car was totally lost. My car was badly damaged. The windows of my home exploded. In my house we found many small pieces of metal. The small metal pieces can kill.

“I was lucky because I went into the shelter. We were in the middle of dinner and I didn’t want to go into the shelter but my wife screamed at me and when your wife says something you must do it.”

Sapir College, where Avitan has worked for more than 40 years, is the “most sheltered institute in the world,” according to the softly spoken Israeli. In 2008 the government opted to cover the building with a huge concrete shelter. The decision was made days after 35-year-old student Rony Ichia was killed in a rocket attack.

Theoretically, students can remain at their desks as the rockets are fired. However, in practice it is not always the case.

Avitan said: “Sometimes the students hear the alarm and they are not strong enough to handle it, so they have to be taken to hospital - they are traumatised.”

Israeli law student Neria Dedon, 31, who defied the warnings to come to the near-deserted Sapir College last week, admitted: “It’s not safe to be here. It’s dangerous. Gaza is three kilometres from here. They often attack. It’s been like this for 20 years. Sometimes I am very afraid. It’s not good for us. My children and my wife moved to Jerusalem, but I need to stay here to study.”

Netanel Zitun, 30, who is also a law student, took me to a commemorative stone next to a bomb shelter in the college grounds.

He said: “Ten years ago a student died right there. Gaza is very close. I have seen many explosions.”

Sderot Mayor Alon Davidi said three of his seven children suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

I spoke to Mr Davidi at an emergency control centre next to a school in Sderot. A bank of wall-mounted screens allow staff to see every street. All of them were deserted last week.

“The regime in Gaza believe in death,” Mr Davidi said. “They don’t send the rockets to army bases, they send them to Sderot. To my family, to the people of Sderot.

“I have seven kids and three of my kids suffer from the post trauma problem. It’s very tough. It’s depression. If you grow up in this situation, every time you go out the door someone is trying to kill you. My kids don’t understand anything else.

“But I want to say I don’t hate anyone. We think about the simple people that live in Gaza. But this is about the fight between the ideology of death and the ideology of life.”

I requested access to Gaza to see the devastation on the other side of the border, but a foreign office spokesman declined. “The border is closed,” said the spokesman. “It’s not safe”.

Mayor Davidi added: “I know that the picture that come from Gaza is a bad picture. But our army must protect us. I accept that they must do whatever they can to protect us.”

I stopped for lunch at a roadside café (one of the few in the area that had opened) and was twice interrupted by a flurry of notifications on my phone which forced every diner to shuffle into a reinforced concrete bomb shelter, along with heavily armed soldiers who were also eating at the café.

In the calm chaos, people’s worried faces were lit up by the mobile phone screens as they waited for the all clear. When it came they simply continued eating lunch,

I later learned a nearby home was smashed by a rocket. Mercifully, there were no deaths in the city of Sderot, but several people were wounded by shrapnel.

In the nearby town of Ashkelon a man was killed and two women seriously injured when a rocket slammed into an apartment in a four-storey building.

At least one civilian in Israel died last week and several were killed by Israeli air strikes in Gaza. The barrage followed a botched spying mission by Israeli special forces several miles inside Gaza on November 11.

An Israeli lieutenant colonel and seven Palestinians died in an exchange of gunfire in the first known ground incursion there by Israeli forces since the last war in 2014.

Among the dead was a commander in Hamas’s armed wing. Israel denied the operation was a targeted assassination, suggesting the Israeli special forces did not want to be discovered.

A statement issued later by the Israeli Defence Forces said the operation “was not intended to kill or abduct terrorists but to strengthen Israeli security”.

Meanwhile, Sderot’s 24,000 residents are caught in the crossfire. And this city under siege has piqued the interest of international statesmen.

Among the previous visitors to Sderot’s Sapir College is Barak Obama (shortly before his election as US president) and Ban Ki-moon, when he was United Nations Secretary General.

Speaking after the visit to Sapir College in 2012, Ban Ki-moon said: “Nothing justifies the indiscriminate firing of rockets and mortars into Israel. It is completely unacceptable to target and terrorise citizens on a near-daily basis. It must stop. Any such attack must be condemned.

“Just before coming here, I visited Gaza. Gaza's civilians are also suffering. They are vulnerable to militant activity and military operations by Israel.

After two days of intense fighting a ceasefire mediated by the United Nations and the Egyptians allowed civilians in Sderot and in Gaza to emerge from hiding.

But the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been under pressure to adopt a more aggressive policy against Gaza – his defence minister resigned over the issue last week - so the ceasefire may not hold for long.

WHY THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY MUST ACT TO STOP ROCKET ATTACKS ON ISRAEL

By human rights lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky

Last Monday evening, as families in Scotland were gathering with their loved ones at home for dinner, thousands of families across southern Israel were forced to seek cover in bomb shelters.

In the space of 24 hours, at least 500 rockets were rained upon us by Palestinian Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

To put this in context, approximately 300,000 Israeli civilians were in the line of fire. That is the equivalent of about half the population of Glasgow, or almost the total of Dundee and Aberdeen combined.

Imagine if even one rocket was fired on Scotland, on your family, your community? What would you do?

During the attack, at least one Israeli soldier and a civilian were killed, with over a hundred injured.

The reason there were not more casualties is not because of lack of effort on the part of Hamas, an internationally recognised terror organisation sworn to Israel’s destruction which invests millions of pounds in foreign aid in attack tunnels and rockets.

The reason there were not more casualties was because Israel invests money in fortified bomb shelters and ‘Red Alert’ advanced warning systems.

If you’re lucky, the Red Alert affords you the ‘luxury’ of 15 seconds to find shelter, though often even less, depending how close to the Gaza border you are.

What Hamas is doing is essentially committing a double war crime – they are indiscriminately firing at Israeli civilian areas, while hiding behind Palestinian civilians and using the Palestinian people as human shields and Israelis as hostage to their terror.

The fact is attacks like this do not occur in a vacuum and are largely the direct result of the international community’s failure to hold Palestinian terror groups like Hamas to account.

It is ironic that, at the same time as we are repeatedly told there is supposedly an “unprecedented humanitarian crisis” in Gaza, Hamas seemingly has no shortage of money to fire off at least 500 rockets at Israeli civilians in one day. Imagine if they instead invested that money in schools, hospitals or homes?

Israel, like any sovereign nation, including Scotland, has the inalienable right and duty to take whatever steps necessary to defend its citizens and protect its borders, but the international community, which rarely wastes an opportunity to condemn Israel over settlements, also has an important role to play.

It is high time that those who truly care about peace and do not wish to be complicit in every rocket and mortar fired at the Jewish state began to hold Hamas to account. Failure to do so will only further embolden and empower this jihadist terror group.

Arsen Ostrovsky is an Israel-based international human rights lawyer. He Tweets as @Ostrov_A.

HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANISATION AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL’S OVERVIEW OF ISRAEL

June marked 50 years since Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories and the start of the 11th year of its illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip, subjecting approximately 2 million inhabitants to collective punishment and a growing humanitarian crisis. The Israeli authorities intensified expansion of settlements and related infrastructure across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and severely restricted the freedom of movement of Palestinians. Israeli forces unlawfully killed Palestinian civilians, including children, and unlawfully detained within Israel thousands of Palestinians from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), holding hundreds in administrative detention without charge or trial. Torture and other ill-treatment of detainees, including children, remained pervasive and was committed with impunity. Israel continued to demolish Palestinian homes in the West Bank and in Palestinian villages inside Israel, forcibly evicting residents. Conscientious objectors to military service were imprisoned. Thousands of African asylum-seekers were threatened with deportation.