12:38 PM A Gazan rocket hit inside a Kibbutz in the Sha’ar Negev region, just after 12:30 PM.

No injuries or damage are reported.

12:56 PM 5 rockets hit Shaar HaNegev region. No injuries or damage reported.

1:10 PM Alert in Ashkelon

1:15 PM 6 rockets land in Shaar HaNegev open area.

2:00 PM 4 rocket hits Eshkol region. Fire starts.

2:19 PM Rocket hits open area.

3:49 PM Red Alert Shaar HaNegev.

5:36 PM Nir Oz. Two in the ground.

6:56 PM Red Alert Eshkol Region

8:13 PM Eshkol region

9:55 PM Shaar HaNegev. Open area.

10:40 PM Red Alert Ashekelon.

Residents of the Eshkol Regional Council headed again for their bomb shelters this morning.

A single Qassam rocket was fired shortly after 9:15 a.m. from Gaza, which is now part of the newly-unified Palestinian Authority “unity government” bonding the region’s former Hamas terrorist rulers together with the Ramallah-based Fatah faction led by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. The missile landed in an open field near the entrance of a kibbutz near Israel’s southern border, the 0404 website reported.

No one was injured and there was no damage, according to officials at the site.

The Color Red rocket alert siren blared throughout the region at about 9:15 a.m. local time, sending residents in the area racing for their safe spaces.

Because the region is located so close to the border with Gaza, most public buildings, including schools, are protected with anti-rocket armored roofing. Those in private homes, stores and malls, however, still must reach safety within 15 seconds before the rocket or missile or mortar explodes in their area.

The question now is, will the unification of Fatah — whose paramilitary forces were armed, equipped and trained by the U.S. military forces in Jordanian training camps over the past several years — bring even more firepower to Gaza, already generously funded and armed to the teeth by Iran?

How does Israel respond to today’s attack, given the delicate diplomatic dance involved with the current, ah… shall we say, ‘discussions’ … going on between Jerusalem, Washington and Brussels over the new reality in the Palestinian Authority?

A PA delegation from Ramallah was in Washington two days ago, in fact, to shmooze with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

The United States and the European Union are strongly supporting the new PA Unity Government (PUG), because it ostensibly is comprised of ministers with “independent” status, allegedly unaffiliated with any terrorist group. Nevertheless, five Hamas-backed lawmakers were sworn into their new office from Gaza through a video hookup last week, and the new government allegedly now administers Gaza as well as PA-controlled areas of Judea and Samaria.

Although PA leader Abbas insisted the new entity would continue to “work towards peace,” this morning’s attack makes clear that last week’s statement by his coalition partners (Hamas and allied terror group Islamic Jihad) — that they intend to continue the fight to annihilate Israel — has more credibility.

A solar energy company headquartered at a Conservative Jewish kibbutz spread its solar energy investments with the launch of six new solar fields in the Negev and Arava, north of Eilat, on Monday.

The $150-million projects cover 128 acres on moshavim and kibbutzim.

Arava, based on the Ketura Kibbutz in the Arava, approximately 43 miles north of Eilat, also has begun construction of a 150-acre solar energy farm near Ketura and which will be able to supply more than a third of Eilat’s electricity’s needs

“Now that the current quotas have been utilized, the time has come to launch the economic tariff era, and to build scores of additional projects, all of them in the Negev and Arava, ventures which long ago demonstrated eligibility for tariff approval, ventures which can be hooked up to the national grid within a year of publication of the second campaign series,” said Arava Power CEO Jon Cohen said.

Arab has been an innovator in clean energy. It recently installed the world’s first automated cleaning system with 84 robots for its solar 28,000 panels.

The kibbutz is environmentally oriented in other areas besides solar energy.

Its operates Algatechnologies, a leading manufacturer and supplier of natural algae astaxanthin. The company announced on Monday the launch of a new products, called AstaPure® 20% astaxanthin oleoresin, which “offers much smaller, friendlier sized capsules without changing or reducing the astaxanthin dosage,” according to Efrat Kat, Director of Marketing and Sales at Algatech.

Algatech’s cultivation process employs a closed system that remains completely exposed to natural sunlight.

AstaPure products are used in multiple forms of dietary supplements, “cosmeceuticals,” foods and beverages.

A trailer full of milk, apparently having come from a nearby kibbutz, failed to negotiate a turn at the Alon Shvut junction in Gush Etzion and turned over on its side.

A security camera recorded the accident, which left the driver with light injuries but enough to be send him to Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem.

The video shows the trucker was driving too fast. As for the milk, there wasn’t much to do but cry.

Middle East experts are experts by virtue of their positions of power.

Some of them, like former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, even have learned a thing or two about international affairs. Rice actually has a Ph.D., which as comedian-pianist Victor Borge once said, should be read as “phttttttttttt.”

The experts, and that includes John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Catherine Ashton and the Oslo Accords crowd, may have learned about prophets, kings, oil and sheikhs in International Relations 101, but they missed out on the basics, like selling non-kosher turkeys to the Arabs.

I learned more about Arab-Jewish relations by working in kibbutz turkey barns than Kerry and Ashton could ever learn in their worldwide visits to official residents of presidents and prime ministers in Ramallah, Jerusalem and Amman.

Turkeys, like people, are cute when they are babies, but after a few weeks, they are not like most people. Their feet are scratchy and they begin to stink. When they get to be three months old, some of them pick up a cold, a little bronchitis, or start to hobble on weak knees, probably from too many carbohydrates.

Then they start acting like grown teenagers. The stronger turkeys pick on the weaker ones, just like fifth-graders playing king of the hill. They peck at the skin until the poor gobbler cannot stand on his feet.

When I was in charge of the birds on a kibbutz farm, the sick and injured had their own quarters, a fenced-off intensive care ward where the bullies couldn’t bother them. But sometimes it was too late. Their broken legs and their bronchitis often are more than modern medicine can cure on a cost-efficient basis.

What can you do with a sick and lame turkey? You sell it cheaply. After all, the reason to raise turkeys is turn them into fat candidates for the slaughterhouse and convert them into cold cash. The Humane Society really does not have much demand for them.

That’s where a revised International Relations 101 course could have taught the experts, sitting in their sterilized offices, something besides making roadmaps to nowhere. Even Professor Yossi Beilin, the darling of the Israeli Left, doesn’t know a kibbutz from Damascus.

Peace is a business, like anything else these days. But you have to know the rules of the game. A good Western businessman knows that a handshake is a handshake, a word is a word, and a deal is a deal.

For instance, Tom wants to sell his two-year-old Chevy for $5,000. Clyde wants to buy it for $4,000. One of them budges or there’s no deal. Jim tries to cut a deal at $4,400. If Tom and Clyde compromise at $4,500, Tom gets his money and Clyde gets his wheels. As for Jim, that’s his problem.

But that’s not the way it works in the Middle East. Here, Abe writes out a check and Ahmed gives him the key. The next day, Abe discovers the key doesn’t fit. “Of course it does not fit,” Ahmed retorts. “The price of the car was according to the real value of the dollar. The inflation rate went up 0.2 percent yesterday. You owe me $10!”

Abe protests, “Where’s the cell phone antenna that was on the roof? I am stopping payment on the check. You owe me $25 for the bank charge.”

“I’m not finished stripping the car,” retaliates Ahmed. The DVD is mine, but I’ll put back the original radio. It works most of the time, especially the Al Jazeera channel.”

“Look, here,” snarls Abe. “I paid you $4,500, but that was based on the price of gold. It went up two cents yesterday. The real price is $4,498.09.”

“You can add another $120 for the deluxe hub caps, or I’ll take them with me,” Ahmed shouts.

They agree to talk again tomorrow. That was 10 years ago. They still are talking.

It doesn’t matter that Abe still has to thumb a ride to work and that Ahmed does the same because he doesn’t have enough money for gas. The principles are that the other guy didn’t get what he wanted so they can continue arguing.

In Western societies, negotiations are a means to an end. The objective is to make a deal so both sides get what they want.

Three more Jews, two of them with Israeli citizenship, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday, bringing to two the number of professors associated with Israeli universities who have been awarded Nobel prizes so far this year. Most of the winners have been Jews.

The-three man all Jewish team of Professors Aryeh Warshel, Michael Levitt and Martin Karplus, won the prize in chemistry for the development of multi-scale models for complex chemical systems.

Warshel is an Israel who was born in Kibbutz Sde Nachum, studied at Haifa’s Technion Institute and earned his doctorate at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv. Levitt, who also holds Israeli citizenship, was born in South Africa and is a professor at Stanford University. Karplus was born in Austria in 1930 and in 1938 escaped to the United States, where he earned his doctorate at the California Institute of Technology

Intentionally or not, TIME magazine’s report did not note that two of the winners were Israeli citizens.

It is doubtful that TIME was suddenly being so pro-Israel that it wanted to bury the facts from the Boycott Israel movement, which includes academics in Britain and other countries in Europe as well some in Australia who want to punish for the supposed “occupation” Israel by breaking off ties with its universities.

That would mean the Israelis would not be able share research with them, but in this childish game, it is the anti-Zionists who would lose out. Perhaps they deserve their own punishment. If the BDS folks were intellectually honest, they would protest against the Nobel Prize judges for awarding professors from Israleli universities.

There also is plenty of leeway for the anti-Semitic crowd to claim that Jews, including a Holocaust survivor, are running the world since they have won no less than six of the Nobel prizes awarded this week. A couple of non-Jews also have been recognized, and their numbers will likely rise as prizes are announced in the fields of literature and peace.

Francois Englert, a Belgian Jewish professor at Tel Aviv University and a Holocaust survivor, shared the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for their discovery of the Higgs particle, known as the “God particle,” which is said to have caused the Big Bang.

On Monday,  Jewish Americans James Rothman of Yale University and Randy Schekman of the University of California, Berkeley, joined German-born researcher Thomas Suedhof, a non-Jew from Stanford University, in winning  the Nobel Prize in medicine.

Israeli leaders were as excited as the Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, if not more so.

President Shimon Peres called and congratulated Prof. Warshel and joked, “How does it feel for a man from the kibbutz to win a Nobel Prize?”

President Peres continued and said, “I want to congratulate you on behalf of the State of Israel and the Jewish people and every person who hopes to overcome sickness and suffering because of your work. I am sure that your breakthrough will lead to advances in medicine and further scientific breakthroughs.”

He asked Prof. Warshel to convey his congratulations to the other prize winners, professors Levitt Karplus.

Israelis have won no less than six Nobel prizes in the past 11 years.

The BDS movement has not commented.

A 10-member delegation of dairy farmers from the Punjab region of India recently visited Israel to participate in a training program about modern dairy farming techniques at kibbutzim and moshavim across Israel.

A member of the delegation, Karnail Singh, told the Times of India that weather conditions in Israel are similar to Punjab but that in Israel there are “special arrangements to control heat stress.”

Singh noted that many dairy farms in Israel employ such technology as solar systems that generate electricity for the farming functions. There are 776 family-owned farms and 163 cooperative-based farms in Israel.

The Punjab delegation also included veterinarians, researchers and staff from the Punjab Dairy Development Board.