We had 4 rounds of rockets fired on Tel Aviv yesterday, the last one at 21:45. A 5-year-old girl that lives in the building cried hysterically all the way to the shelter, and then while we waited for 10 minutes in the shelter, and then all the back to her parents’ apartment, and then until midnight. I couldn’t blame her.

Today will likely be marked with a lot of attacks as President Biden is planning a visit tomorrow. We’ve already had a few rounds of rockets fired on Tel Aviv, two while I was writing this post.

I decided to answer a few questions here, some from the comments, some from questions I got from friends who live abroad.

About the rocket barrages

When there’s a rocket barrage there’s a notification in all the new channels, a notification and siren from the Home Front app, a notification in the Home Front Telegram channel, and air raid sirens. The sirens are loud but depending on where you live you might not hear them very well.

The Home Front app is something that you download from the App store/Google Play for free and then it uses GPS to send you location based alerts, or you can ask for alerts for a specific area. Everyone knows the name of the area they live in, but if you don’t you can write your address in the app and it finds it for you. Tel Aviv is a large city so it has several areas: south, central, east and north. Most cities have one or two areas.

The app is GPS based and there have been issues with GPS in Israel over the last few days — as part of the war here there are deliberate GPS scrambling periods, particularly in northern Israel, where Hizballah and Hamas have been firing missiles of various kinds on cities, villages, and military outposts along the border. That means that everyone had to add their location manually to the app to receive alerts.

Once an alert sounds you have between a minute and a minute and half (depending on where you live) to get to shelter. The sirens and notifications are loud (as are the rocket explosions), and ever since they started everyone is jumpy every time there’s any kind of loud noise. It’s more pronounced now as the city is completely quiet otherwise — very few cars, buses or people around. The ambulances have changed their siren sounds to be different than they usually are, so they’ll be distinct from the siren sounds.

NOTE: People in southern Israel have much less time to get to their shelter. Those next to the Gaza border have 0-30 seconds, those slightly further away have between 30 and 45 seconds, and these areas have received by far the most rocket barrages, several of them direct hits. If you want to know how that feels, lay down in your bed, and then start the stopwatch on your phone. How long does it take you to get up, put on some sort of footwear, and either get to a windowless internal room (that isn’t the bathroom as it’s full of glass and ceramics that will shatter on impact), to your basement or to a stairwell in your building? People get injured running to safe locations all the time in part because you often have very little time to react. If you have a dog you also need to grab it and take them with you.

As you only have a minute, a minute and a half to get to shelter, and as large gatherings have been forbidden, a lot of “normal life” has completely stopped. But more on that later.

My shelter is at the basement of my building. For many buildings in Tel Aviv it’s the stairwell — you go out of your apartment, and go down two stories and wait. Our stairwell is full of glass and open to the outside world and so is unsafe. The basement is on floor minus one, and I live on the first floor, so I normally don’t have problems getting there in a minute and a half. There are people in my building that are disabled and live on the fourth floor, and you’re not allowed to use the elevator during an attack, in case you get trapped there. They stay in their apartment and hope for the best 😦

In the basement I get to meet many my neighbors, their kids and dogs, and sometimes people that were outside in the area while there were sirens and were allowed into the building to take shelter. In the past we used to leave the doors to the building open for just such cases, but now with the possibility of terrorists still active in the area, people need to be buzzed into the building or have the door opened for them.

The kids thought that it was all a big adventure at first, but as the days go by and the number of attacks doesn’t fall, it’s affecting them more and more. The dogs too range from the hysterical to the apathetic.

I have two cats which I’m forced to leave behind as I go to take shelter. They hide under the bed and there’s no way I can stuff them into a carrier and bring them down with me in a minute and a half.

Once I’m in the basement, we wait for 10 minutes, listening for the “boom!” That indicates either a rocket hit or an Iron Dome missile hitting the rocket and it exploding in mid-air. It’s loud, sometimes loud enough to shake the entire building. During those 10 minutes everyone is on their phone, getting updates from everyone else, checking the news, various messaging groups, trying to figure out what’s going on.

Oftentimes the attacks come in waves, which means waiting 20-30 minutes in the shelter. Those who live in the south of Israel can sometimes spend hours in the shelter.

How everyday life looks like here

It’s rough. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been evacuated or displaced. Many of them have lost members of their family, their home, and all their belongings in a span of a few short hours. Imagine arriving at a hotel after being evacuated to it on an armored carrier, having had terrorists tear through your home, brutally murder your family and friends, kidnap people you knew and cared about, and burn houses and fields. You have nothing on you — no clothes, no toiletries, no medications, no food, no water, sometimes no phone. You likely can’t use your credit card because the terrorist have bother to stop their killing spree to steal it and then proceeded to buy stuff with it. You have been in a few short hours completely stripped of your identity, your faith in your country, your grasp of reality shattered.

If you lived in the south, in cities like Sderot, you couldn’t leave the house for a week. There were gun and grenade wielding terrorists in the streets, missiles fired constantly on you, and you only have a minute to get to shelter. You can’t go buy groceries, and you can’t get medications, and you don’t know when it will end.

In both cases volunteers came to your aid — getting into private cars and trucks with supplies donated by people from central Israel, and bringing them to you. Food, clothes, medication, baby food, diapers, tampons and sanity napkins, phone chargers, toys, etc. Not long after that companies started coming through with donations of their own.

If you’re a reserve soldier you’ve been drafted to a war zone in a few short hours, and likely had to make your own way there. Nobody is prepared for such an influx of soldiers, so there’s not enough food, shelter, equipment at first. You’re fighting, your family is worried, but you’re in the desert or in the mountains of the Galilee — there’s no place to charge your phone, and cell service isn’t great to say the least. My friend’s husband could only send her a single heart emoji once a day to let her know that he was alive. He hasn’t showered for 10 days, and the fighting has been non-stop. They got to talk in the weekend thanks to a guy with a generator and a truck, that rigged together a 100 charging outlets to it. He open sourced the design and a few other people did the same. Others organized carpooling services to soldiers to and from the army’s staging areas in the south and the north.

If you’re like me and live in central Israel, in a place like Tel Aviv, then this is how you’re life has changed so far:

• If you have kids, they’re at home. No school, no kindergarten, no pre-school, not even if your kid is special needs. During the first week you’ve got zero help with them — not even remote learning. Many of the teachers have young kids, and partners that were reservists that were enlisted. Teaching the multiplication table is the last thing on their minds right now.
• There’s no gym, no pools, no pilates or yoga classes, and most runners have stopped running outside or changed their runs to be very short running circuits near a shelter. You can’t go to the beach, swim or surf.
• The first week was marked by extreme shortages of groceries — first because people bought stuff to send south, and then because they bought stuff to stock up due to a scare caused by the Home Front. Also, fresh produce is in shorter supply and of lesser quality as much of it comes from areas that are now an active war zone.
• If you have pets, not only is taking your dog on a walk a risk, and having dogs or cats during missile attacks a challenge, you also have issues with pet supplies. The main supply centre for pet food is down south, and there are delays in supply imports.
• The city has gone scarily quiet, except for helicopters, air raid sirens, and ambulance sirens.
• You time your showers to hours where the Hamas is less likely to fire on you. You make them as quick as possible, to not get caught in one during an attack.
• If you had an elective surgery, if you had a doctor’s appointment or a physiotherapy appointment it was likely cancelled or postponed.
• Public transport is barely available, and if you have a car, you’re likely scared to use it, so you stay at home. Being caught out during a rocket attack in a car means leaving the car and laying down on the road, covering your head with your arms and hoping you won’t get hit.
• If you’re a cancer patient and need to get to chemo or radiotherapy, your life has become much, much more difficult. Can you get to the treatment centre? Will there be anyone to escort you during treatments? Various cancer related charities have jumped in to help.
• People are on the news sites, messaging apps or social media all day only talking about the war and nothing else.
• I’m doom scrolling on news sites all the time.
• There are phishing attacks, disinformation and fake news in WhatsApp and Telegram, and if you have a public facing anything you likely got messages hoping that you died and all jews were wiped off the face of the earth.
• Restaurants, shops, coffee places are largely closed. Those that are open have much fewer things on the menu, and they close much earlier. Nighttime is when the rockets are fired. Everyone is at home.
• Your “delightful” employer may require you to come to the office, despite the rocket risk and the fact that you can work from home. Mine hasn’t, but many of friend’s employers have.
• Homeless people have moved to stay around the public bomb shelters.

What’s the biggest thing that global news media and social media aren’t telling us about the situation right now

The level of anger and distrust towards our terrible government are at an all time high. The pro-democracy activists are leading the relief and volunteer efforts, while the government disappoints us again and again. People feel rightfully betrayed, they feel like there’s a tremendous crisis of leadership and professionalism in our government, and that it’s up to us, the citizens, to take care of ourselves. That’s never happened to this degree ever before. Ministers and members of the (religious and right winged) ruling parties get literal objects thrown at them when they arrive to hospitals and evacuee centres. Netanyahu rigged his meeting with the families of those kidnapped so it would look like they embraced him and supported him. A growing majority want him and his government out, and despite having restrictions on large gatherings of people that prevent demonstrations now, there are small demonstrations next to ministers and the PMs houses.

What about the people of Gaza

I was sickened by the decision to cut off their electricity and water supply. There are tactical reasons to do so and I’ve heard them all and I disagree with them all.
While the number of dead there is also in the thousands, there is deliberately no split between Hamas terrorists and civilians killed, to give people the false sense that 100% of the dead in Gaza are civilians and zero Hamas terrorists were killed.

The call to evacuate the northern part of the strip is meant to prevent Hamas from using their favourite tactic of attacking from the midst of civilian populations, particularly schools, hospitals, mosques. If you think Hamas cares about the people of Gaza you haven’t seen them shoot Palestinian reporters who dared criticize them, or use UNRA schools to stash weapons, or steal aid and supplies from civilians for their own needs. Their leaders live and operate from Qatar, and their stated goal isn’t to better Palestinian lives, but to kill as many jews as possible. They attacked now so that they could stop the Saudis from affecting the area — even with our religious, ultra right wind government an agreement with the Suadis was going to include aid to Gaza and improve Palestinian lives. And cut off their best friends Iran from influencing the area.

I hate to see the destruction in Gaza. I hate that civilians there are trapped by Hamas in a war zone. Yes, there are many of them that support Hamas and enjoyed seeing babies and grandmas butchered in their beds. I still don’t think that we need to raze the place to the ground. And to be 100% clear, we won’t be razing Gaza to the ground. Those that say we will are clueless at best and spreading hatred and antisemitism at worst. Before this attack I believed in a two state solution and voted for leftist parties repeatedly. After this attack the Israeli sentiment is much more right wing than before, which in itself is a win for Hamas and their attempt to delegitimize the Palestinian authority and destabilize the area. I will still vote for leftist parties (and be called a traitor for it by many Israelis), and I still believe in a two state solution. I just don’t see a path to it now, which is another victory for the Hamas.

Here’s Inktober 15, 16 and 17.