SDEROT, ISRAEL — Like a candidate canvassing the neighborhood, Sen. John McCain paid a call on the Amar family Wednesday in their yellow stone house on Sinai Street.
"He came in, shook hands, talked at eye level and was not condescending," Aliza Amar said. "He walked in with simplicity, as if he lives around here."
He doesn't. The all-but-certain Republican nominee for the White House stopped in Israel during a seven-day overseas trip to affirm his friendship with the Jewish state and his solidarity with its most besieged citizens.
McCain was led to the Amars' modest home because part of its tile roof had been blown off by a Palestinian rocket fired from the Gaza Strip on Dec. 13. Amar, 40, a mother of four, told him how the blast had knocked her from her wheelchair and pierced her knee with shrapnel.
Other townspeople told him of the trauma caused by the more than 1,000 rockets fired in or around this desert town near the Gaza border since that day.
Speaking to reporters later at Sderot's community center, McCain called the barrage "a terrible tragedy" and said his tour of the town with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak had helped him understand the severity of Israel's much-criticized military incursions into Gaza.
Thirteen Israelis have been killed in the last seven years by the crude, wildly inaccurate Kassam rockets. But the frequency of the attacks "puts an enormous strain on people here," McCain said, noting that the town's alert system gives residents about 15 seconds to run for cover.
"That is not a way for people to live," he said. "No nation in the world can be attacked incessantly and have its population killed and intimidated without responding."
Officially, the Arizona senator is touring the Middle East and Europe on a fact-finding trip along with two fellow members of the Senate Armed Services Committee -- Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, and Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican.
But McCain's appearances at Israel's Holocaust memorial, at the Western Wall and in Sderot seemed tailored to appeal to American Jewish voters. The first two venues have long been traditional photo-op stops for U.S. presidential candidates visiting Israel.
Sderot has not been.
But the town's plight is becoming a cause celebre in the United States among Jews and others attentive to the threat posed by the Islamic group Hamas, which rules Gaza, and other militant groups that advocate Israel's destruction.
