Israel-Gaza: Heavy bombing of Gaza as Hamas fires rockets

BBC Copyright: BBC Tova Levy (left) and Najwa Sheikh-Ahmad (right) are both worried about their children's safety as fighting worsens Image caption: Tova Levy (left) and Najwa Sheikh-Ahmad (right) are both worried about their children's safety as fighting worsens

Since missiles began pounding close to her family's home on the Gaza Strip this week, Najwa Sheikh-Ahmad has been too scared to sleep.

"The nights are so scary for us - for our children," Najwa, a mother of five, says. "In any moment your home might be your grave."

All day, she can hear the roar of Israeli fighter jets flying overhead, along with the sound of explosions of missiles and aerial bombardments. "Everything is shaking around us," she says. "And we are shaking too because we are so afraid."

She is one of many residents in Israel and Gaza who have been gripped by fear, as Palestinian militants and Israeli forces continue to exchange fire, and street violence among Jewish and Israeli Arab mobs has erupted in many Israeli towns. More than 100 people have been killed in Gaza and seven in Israel since fighting began on Monday.

The BBC has spoken to two mothers - one Palestinian, one Jewish Israeli - who have been caught up in the worst fighting the region has experienced in years.

When a violent Israeli-Arab mob reached the street outside her home in the town of Lod on Monday night, Tova Levy knew it was time for her Israeli-Jewish family to flee.

Throughout the evening, Tova had been reading worrying updates in her community WhatsApp group. Friends sent messages warning that a "mob" had left one of the local mosques, and were involved in full-scale rioting across the mixed Arab-Jewish Israeli town, lying 15km (9 miles) south-east of Tel Aviv.

Soon, she says, the rioters were close to her house, where she lives with her husband and two young children.

"They started burning things. [It was] really, really shocking... I was terrified," Tova says. "I thought, 'What's preventing them from walking up and breaking down my door?'"