It’s 21:00 here and Tel Aviv is dead quiet as everyone is waiting for the rocket barrage the Islamist Jihad promised at 21:00. We already had two rocket barrages today, and everybody’s nerves are starting to wear thin. The neighbors are nice and everyone is kind, and tries to remain calm and cheerful as there are little kids with us in the shelter, but you can see how tired everybody is. Nobody has slept well since Saturday morning, when this whole thing started.

Supermarket shelves are empty and there’s rationing. The issue is a terrible amalgamation of people buying supplies to send south, to where the fighting is going on, and the home front spokesman causing widespread panic when he told people to hoard 72 hours worth of food and water. Couple that with the fact that there aren’t enough delivery drivers and that produce isn’t coming in from the south anymore, and you get supermarkets with no dairy, eggs, fruits, vegetables, bottled water, etc.

People are still looking for ways to help, which means 1,500 stood in line for hours to donate blood in Tel Aviv today, and people are opening their homes to refugees and survivors from the attacks on the southern, (and now also the northern) border.

Everyone who can is working from home, shops and restaurants are closed, and school is still cancelled, though classes are resuming remotely, like they did in Covid times. Parents now also face the challenge of making sure their kids don’t see videos and pictures of the slaughter that happened in the south.

At work things have slowed to a crawl — a lot of people are on reserve duty, others are out helping the situation in every way they can, and the rest of us are finding it hard to concentrate on work when the torrent of bad news keeps pouring in: so many kidnapped, missing, wounded, dead. Entire kibbutzs wiped off the face of the earth in a few short hours. My mind still finds it hard to accept this new reality, and I find myself reviewing the events from Saturday onward again and again, trying to make sense of it all.

This is today’s sketch. It’s the best I could do under the circumstances.