Sderot is clearly within the Green Line that marked the limits of Israel before the 1967 Six Day War. But that has not stopped Palestinian groups in neighboring Gaza from keeping up a regular bombardment of relatively low-tech but still potentially lethal Qassam missiles at it for more than six years.

During that time no less than 6,000 Qassams have been fired from Gaza. The volume and rate of fire has dramatically speeded up since Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, which is dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel, seized total power in Gaza from the Fatah movement that controls the Palestinian Authority.

They have extremely poor accuracy and cannot be fired in formidable mass battery fashion like the BM 21 Grad or Katyusha Multiple Launch Rocket Systems with their 122mm rockets that Hezbollah, the Shiite Party of God, used to such effect against Israel in southern Lebanon in July 2006.

Compared with the nuclear-capable Shihad-3 intermediate-range ballistic missile and the Ukrainian-manufactured cruise missiles with which Iran can already threaten Israel, or the tactically formidable, Russian-made Iskander-Ms that Russia has sold to Syria, the Qassams do not sound like much. They are at the very low tech -- or lowest common denominator -- end of the ballistic missile threat spectrum. They have an extremely short range of only a few miles and can carry a warhead of only 22 pounds to 26.4 pounds.

And compared with the enormous civilian death toll that such weapons can inflict, the casualties inflicted by the Qassams do not sound like much. Some 12 Israeli citizens of Sderot have been killed by them since 2004, although no less than 1,500 have been injured.

But the Qassams pose a formidable ongoing challenge of their own to accepted concepts of ballistic missile defense. No effective BMD system to defend against them exists anywhere, although the Israelis over the past year have been energetically looking for one. And they would like it to also be effective against Hezbollah's at least 9,000 MLRS batteries still deployed in southern Lebanon.

The Qassams are cheap to manufacture and can be made even with the extremely limited industrial tools and capacity currently available in Gaza. They also represent the application of a high-tech 20th and 21st century weapon -- the ballistic missile -- to one of the oldest forms of human warfare -- ethnic displacement conflict.

For the whole purpose of the Qassams is to make Sderot uninhabitable by its dogged Israeli citizens. In this respect, they play the same role as did the targeted assassination of Northern Irish Protestant landowners and their sons and heirs by Catholic nationalist gunmen of the Irish Republican Army in order to eliminate the Protestant Loyalist presence in key border areas during the long conflict there.

The Qassams have gone some way to achieving this goal. Sderot's population has dropped by 20 percent in the years since the rain of Qassams started. And they continue to take a toll on those who stay.

Tamar Polat, a child psychiatrist and the grand-daughter of a Holocaust survivor, told UPI her 8-year-old son compulsively feels the walls of every house he enters to make sure they are made of concrete to provide some protection against the Qassams. She said the boy is terrified of his mother sleeping on a bunk bed above him to protect him, because he does not want to survive and live if a Qassam hits and kills her instead, leaving him alone.

Qassams regularly fall on Sderot every few hours. Their effect is like a long, slow, endless, continuous drip. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to Israel did not slow down their rate of bombardment, nor, it seems, will the proposed Middle East peace conference next month in Annapolis, Md.

The Qassams are like ponderous old cart horses compared with the lean, impressive, thoroughbred IRBMs and heavyweight ICBMs that most BMD systems and research are directed against. But they can't be ignored either.

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