11 am EET: I couldn’t help but feel panicked. I was using the computer on the 7th/ top floor business lounge when the sirens went off in our hotel.  Since rockets obviously fall out of the sky, the top floor of any building is the last place you want to be during a rocket attack.  I quickly walked out the door and had no idea where the bomb shelter was.  In front of me is a window running the length of the hall that overlooks the inviting deep blue sea.  Strike two for me, windows are the worst thing to hide behind in an attack.  I cower behind one of the cleaning carts housekeeping uses and a steel elevator door.

I can’t hear the children in the daycare located in the hotel.  They’ve gone silent for the first time this morning.  Rocket impacts a couple miles away hitting a home.  No fatalities or injuries.   Family wisely heeded the sirens warning and fled to their bomb shelter.

11:30 am: At the front desk I notice this sign:
Dear Guest,

For your comfort there are shelters on floors 1, 4, 5, 6.

Regards,
Hotel Management

No internet in hotel rooms, but bomb shelters on 4 floors.

1 pm: Producer Ian Rafferty  and I go to fill up gas and pick up water and sunflower seeds for the crew.  The alarm goes off again.  The woman behind the counter pulls my arm and drags me to a closet that’s clearly used for storing.  Packages of soda, chips, and bottled water surrounded us.  There is so much you can tell about a person’s ego based on how they enter a bomb shelter here.

A man with his son entered the “safe room” lacksadaisically – making a show of himself about how he wasn’t scared and how silly everyone else was who ran into the shelter.  Much to the irritation of my producer Ian and the people stuck behind him trying to get in.

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The acrid smell of spent machine gun rounds was floating up through the load master’s porthole on the turret of the Merkava Tank. It burned my nostrils and made my eyes water. The sun had gone down and the little DV camera I had was not getting a good picture of the big cannon on the front of the tank in low light. So, I fished in the pocket of my flack vest and pulled out a little l.e.d. flashlight. I held the camera in my right hand, cause my left one is broken. I used the broken hand to hold the flashlight and tried to illuminate the cannon on the front of the tank.

Adam, the load master, tapped on my leg from the inside of the tank. He told me I needed to get my feet over to a rail that ran along the edge of the cabin inside the tank because the 120 mm cannon was about to fire and if the recoil hit my legs, it would be bad.

So, I had my feet pitched off to one side, both hands extended out like a crossing guard, one recording, one lighting.  I balanced by wedging my flack jacket in the porthole. My head was sticking up out of a Merkava tank, in combat. I was scared.

Did I have my legs out of the way enough? Was I going to lose my hearing? Was I going to get knocked silly and fall into this tank when it fired?

   I got my answer soon enough.

From a distance tank fire always sounds like trucks crashing head-on, without the screeching of tires. When you are balanced above the cannon, it sounds like a big pop. I was wearing one of the Israeli tank crew helmets complete with ear protection. But the headset wasn’t a good fit. There was a gap by my right ear. As I write this, my ear is still ringing.  There was a tremendous flash of light. I was knocked off balance but saved because my Kevlar-wrapped girth kept me wedged tight in the small porthole. The cannon fired a total of 3 times. That followed all of the small arms fire that was directed at a Palestinian Mortar team in the Gaza strip.

Colonel Yigal, who was the commander, told me the mortar team had been firing at infantry soldiers with Israel’s Givati brigades. There were 5 people on the mortar team, 3 of them, he said, had been killed.

That’s the part that struck me. The machinery of war kept me very distant from the human impact. We were roughly 300 yards from the mortar team, but I never saw them. I never heard one of their rounds.  From my perspective, we could have been blasting away at a shooting range.  But as I watched the number of Palestinian dead increased by 3 and with combat still raging as I write, the death toll has crossed 900 and edges ever closer to 1000.

Keep checking back for the latest EXCLUSIVE coverage from Gaza!

545 am EET: The sirens go off in our hotel.  I’m so tired but I know I need to go to the bathroom, sit in the tub, and close the bathroom door. No time to go to the saferoom.  I wonder if the rest of our FOX News crew made it to their bathrooms or if they just rolled over.

3pm: A rocket makes a direct hit on a home in Ashkelon about 15 miles from Gaza.

4pm: We’re at the home.  Dudi and Ian checkout the site and are optimistic we can go LIVE from the 2nd floor of the house where the rocket hit.

They scramble to make it work, but that requires borrowing power from the house next door.  At one point the security guard who has taken over the home refused to let them back in the house where all our gear has been set up.  Dudi says something in Hebrew.  Somehow he managed to get us back in.

5pm: We’re broadcasting live for “America’s Newsroom”. Producer Ian Rafferty and Cameraman Dudi make the impossible happen.  They manage to get us up LIVE from the middle of the rubble.  President Bush has just wrapped up his final press conference.  He says Israel has a right to defend itself as long as rockets keep coming.

After the home we’re at was hit by a Grad rocket,  I talk to Bill Hemmer about how these rockets are smuggled through underground tunnels from Egypt to Gaza. Israel says for any ceasefire agreement to happen they want the tunnels stopped.  They took out 20 yesterday.

6pm: We’ve shot a standup for “Special Report” tonight and are heading back to the Gaza border for more LIVES.  Tune in tonight to Special Report with Bret Baier.

Keep checking back for the latest EXCLUSIVE coverage from Gaza!

Your Facebook status is an electronic bumper sticker. Both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict want to use it.

As the military conflict in Gaza heats up, so does the propaganda war. Both sides are using social networking websites to get their message out to as many people as possible.

On Facebook, two Israeli entrepreneurs have created QassamCount. The site asks users to “donate” their Facebook status bars, which are then automatically updated to display the latest tally of Qassam rockets Hamas fires from Gaza into Israel.

A pro-Palestinian group has created a similar Facebook site called “Stop Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza,” that also solicits status bar donations.

Facebook is just part of the equation when it comes to online social activism in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Groups on both sides are also using “micro-blog” services such as Twitter and posting video, some of it shot on cell phones, on sites such as YouTube.

In the video below, FOX field producer David Lewkowict and I surf the web for some examples of the online battle for public opinion.

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