First you hear the whistle. Then the boom. Hugging tight her 8-year-old daughter, Maia Oriloh is terrified to leave her home in the Israeli town of Sderot after a rocket fired from Gaza hit metres (yards) away. Neighbour Ruthi Levy wakes in panic at the slightest noise.
The missiles spreading fear in Sderot, inaccurate and rarely deadly, point on one hand to the growing difficulty for Palestinian fighters of hitting Israel with more lethal means after four years of an uprising.
But they also send a message that Israel has little hope of total victory and raise a question over the "disengagement" that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon aims for with a plan to quit the occupied Gaza Strip while keeping chunks of the West Bank.
"I hear a boom and my body trembles. I can't live like this. The child, poor thing, she cries so much," said Oriloh, 31, panicked by a rocket strike while she was out shopping.
"We sleep in fear. Even the sound of the garbage truck sets everyone off," said Levy, 54, at a run-down corner store.
Sderot is far from Israel's heart. Its dusty poverty can seem closer to the impoverished Gaza Strip, just two km (1.25 miles) over the fields, than the flashier corners of Tel Aviv.
But the rockets are constantly being improved in the Gaza workshops, flying further, carrying bigger warheads and stirring Israeli fears that other cities could become targets from either Gaza or the West Bank.
"The status of fear and horror lived by people in Israeli settlements and especially in Sderot prove the value of the Qassam rocket," said Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the Hamas Islamic militant group which pioneered the rockets.
Only one of hundreds of rocket launches into Israel and Jewish settlements has proved fatal, killing a 3-year-old boy and a man in Sderot late in June, whereas a Hamas double suicide bombing killed 16 people last month.
But while constant army raids, the killing of top militants and a barrier going up inside the West Bank - condemned by Palestinians as a land grab - have made bombings much harder, the makeshift missiles are proving more difficult to prevent.
At least 20 Palestinians were killed during a five-week siege on one of the main Gaza launching zones after the first fatal rocket strike.
But the siege, plus helicopter attack on metal workshops the army said were making the missiles, could not stop the launching - though they led some Gaza residents to question the wisdom of firing them off if it would provoke such retaliation.
Another raid in early September left at least eight Palestinians dead. The rockets have continued.
Built from steel pipe and powered by a mixture of fertiliser and sugar, the rockets are not hard to make. They can be shifted to position and launched from tripods in a few minutes.
"There is no effective military way to deal with it. We learned that from years of fighting in Lebanon. To stop it you have to control the ground," said Alon Ben-David, an analyst for Jane's Information Group.
"The thing with Qassams in Gaza is that they pose a threat of dragging Israel into Gaza," he said.
Getting back into Gaza is the opposite of what Prime Minister Sharon says he wants as he talks of withdrawing completely from the territory that Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war, plus a fragment of the West Bank.
While most Israelis think Gaza costs too much blood and money to protect 8,000 settlers living alongside 1.3 million Palestinians, the danger of continuing rocket fire has been seized on by far-right opponents of pulling out.
Many Sderot residents also now fear a withdrawal.
"Today it's not good even when the soldiers are inside Gaza. If they leave it will definitely be worse," said Levy at her shop counter, taking a consoling puff on a cigarette.
Some political analysts still believe the situation could improve after a withdrawal from Gaza, particularly if the crumbling Palestinian Authority can regain sway and take control in an orderly manner.
They suggest the current firing is tied partly to a desire by militants to claim victory in the event of a pullout and point to the fact that rocket fire from Lebanon has been minimal since Israel withdrew troops four years ago.
Some factions have also suggested they could apply a long truce in attacks from Gaza if Israel pulled out completely, maybe even for years.
But in the longer term, groups like Hamas are dedicated not just to independence in the West Bank and Gaza, like Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. They also want an Islamic state in all of Israel.
Israelis worry that whatever happens in Gaza, rocket firing could also spread to the West Bank, where Sharon's plan would mean removing only four of 120 settlements and has further angered Palestinians who see dreams of a state slipping away.
The West Bank approaches within Qassam range - currently about 10 km (six miles) - of much of Israel's densely populated coastal plain. It is also peppered with Jewish settlements that could make much nearer targets.
Israeli troops said they seized two rockets being built in the West Bank city of Nablus recently, leading some army officers to describe the Qassams as "a strategic threat".
While that might seem a bit much for the only force in the Middle East presumed to have a nuclear capability, the lesson of Sderot is that even the makeshift rockets can ensure a never-ending conflict.
"There is no magic solution," said one senior Israeli security source. "I am not optimistic."
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