This article first appeared at Waging Nonviolence. A version later appeared alongside a piece by Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish in NOW Magazine under the title "Pressing for Peace".

I spent Thursday afternoon in Ashkelon, Israel, just a few kilometers from the border with Gaza. It’s a city that has lived under the threat of rocket attacks for many years. That day, by 4 p.m. the streets were empty. The mall was closed, and the few people I did see were glued to a newspaper, television or smart-phone. Not far away, people were killing one another and dying. People were running for cover, and many weren't finding it.

During my minibus ride back home to South Tel Aviv, I heard the city’s first air raid siren in over 20 years. Dusk fell, and the highway was much emptier than it ought to have been at that hour. Within five minutes of that heart-wrenching noise my fellow passengers were yelling at one another. “All Arabs are the enemy, because they are all Hamas,” one of them cried.

When a letter to the editor of an internationally recognized news source that comes from a spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in Washington is full of falsehoods it is hard to ignore it.

Claims such as most of the African asylum seekers here in Israel are actually migrant workers can’t be corroborated in part because the Israeli government won’t take the vast majority of the claims that these refugees want to make. As well, the centers that are described in the letter as providing free food and healthcare have also been described as “not suitable for humans” by Israeli officials in some cases.