Israel has rejected relatively inexpensive existing anti-rocket and mortar systems that could provide immediate protection to Sderot among other places.
Yossi Haziza, a Sderot resident in whose courtyard the first rocket exploded, was looking at the walls of his home sprayed with shrapnel and shattered windows.
Obama also visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem, and traveled to Sderot, a town in southern Israel that had suffered from missiles fired from inside the nearby Gaza Strip.
Mekel says the government's problems with the network grew during the recent Israeli military attacks inside Hamas-controlled Gaza following Palestinian rocket attacks on the southern Israeli town of Sderot and the port city of Ashkelon.