Ingathering, literally

Ingathering is exactly what is going on at the moment in Israel, though not the drastic demographic shift imagined by Ehud Olmert. Residents of the Golan and Galil are fleeing their homes and abandoning their villages, businesses, and cities, for what they hope are safer accommodations further south. How far south exactly one has to go in order to escape the Katyushas is up for debate among members of Israel's security apparatus. Some have given a 200 km. range for the most advanced Katyushas, which puts even Beer Sheva in range.
It pains me to say it, but all that we can do now is wait for the IAF and IDF to inflict sufficient damage until the order is passed down to guerilla cells in Lebanon to launch longer range Katyushas--which as of yet have not been deployed against Israel--targeting Haifa and other coastal cities. If that happens, God forbid, though I feel that it is only inevitable, the full might of the IDF will be unleashed, in what will be perhaps an escalation to a declared full-scale war.

While residents of the cities in the north are urged to take cover in their local bomb shelters, I enjoin them to join us, to converge on Jerusalem; an ingathering induced by unfortunate circumstances, but an ingathering nonetheless.

UPDATE: I seem to have portended correctly, along with pretty much everyone else in this country, what happened last evening in Haifa. In a major twist, though, Hizbullah refused to take responsibility for the rocket launch which hit Haifa minutes after 8 PM last night. The well respected and highly authoritative Arab-affairs correspondent for Channel 2, Ehud Ya'ari, noted that the denial could only mean one of two things: (1) Either Hizbullah didn't actually launch the rocket; or (2) they did launch the rocket, perhaps prematurely, and didn't want to absorb the promised harsh Israeli repercussions. Hizbullah's denial, though, was accompanied by a convenient factoid supplied by their spokesperson:

"Though we didn't launch the rocket, it was not a Katyusha, but a 336 mm. Fajr 7, which can carry a 100 kg warhead."

In any event, some journalists are entertaining the possibility that Hizbullah's launch-denial was legitimate, and that the missile was actually launched by Iranian cells operating in Lebanon. This theory would accord well with the widely known alliance of the militant Iranian regime and Syria/Hizbullah. The president of Iran apparently made it clear this morning that an attack by Israel on Syria, would be tantamount to an attack on the entire Arab world.