Today was marked by the rising toll of the dead (1,300) and the hostages (150-200). There are 800 dead that still need to be identified before they can be buried, a gruesome and harrowing ordeal as the bodies have been mutilated beyond recognition. Children are still at home, with remote learning starting only next week. The academic year has been postponed to the beginning of November. There were several rocket barrages aimed at the Ben Gurion airport and now more or less only El Al and Arkia, the Israeli flight carriers, are flying in. That also means that imports and purchases from abroad are significantly delayed. No Prime Day here.

The northern border is heating up, with several run ins with the Hizballah from Lebanon sending thousands of people up north into shelters for hours at a time. In the West Bank there were several terrorist attack attempts, and violent protests.

I went to get my Moderna Covid shot (as a cancer patient I need to keep up to date on all my shots) today, and one of the busiest thoroughfares in Tel Aviv was eerily deserted. Only in Yom Kippur, when there aren’t any cars around, have I seen it like this, and even then there are bikes and pedestrians.

Many bus drivers were drafted, and so the buses are running less frequently, and in some cases complete routes were cancelled. The result is that the normally packed bus lane is now completely free. Shops and restaurants are still largely closed. It’s scary to walk around, and I did the round trip to the clinic as fast as I possibly could, hoping that I won’t be caught outside when there was a rocket barrage.

Thankfully I wasn’t. Normally when there’s a chance of rocket fire, buildings leave their door open so pedestrians can take shelter inside if needed. But now there’s a chance that terrorists are roaming the streets, and people are hyper vigilant and suspicious. Doors are not only locked, they aren’t opened even during a rocket barrage. If you’re outside, you just lay down on the ground and cover your head, hoping for the best. Two friends were severely wounded today in Sderot in the south, as they were caught outside in their car and didn’t have time to get to shelter when rockets fell.

Today’s Inktober is lilies, which are in bloom along the coastline right now.

Here’s hoping for better days.

After being cooped up at home since Saturday (apart from quick runs for supplies to the supermarket next door), my depression hit such a state that I decided I needed to walk outside for a bit, before my PTSD gets completely out of hand. The streets were deserted, the local pool dried out and closed, the marina abandoned.

The weather was perfect and the sea calm, but the beach was empty and no lifeguards were around.

The busy Independence Garden was deserted — no runners, no cyclers, the only person I saw was a grandpa walking his dog.

I’ve never seen it like this — there are people in this area at all times of day and night.

Today was marked by a lot of scares of attacks from Hizballah in the Lebanon, and a human error that sent all the country (including myself) to the shelters for several minutes as we thought that a swarm of explosive laden drones was about to crash land into buildings. These once sci-fi thriller scenarios are now our reality. The neighbors brought food and water into the shelter, and we had several nearby rocket falls (imagine a loud “boom!” and the building shaking around you).

I also learned that the 17-year-old boy that I regularly saw selling flowers at the local farmer’s market was murdered as he went surfing on Saturday with a friend. Just like the paramedic who chose to remain with the wounded in the kibbuz clinic instead of saving herself and was butchered, or the two middle-aged bike riders that were murdered because they couldn’t outride gunshots, or the children that were bound and shot point blank with their parents.

The number of dead is now at around the 1,200 mark, with hundreds more wounded, and hundreds taken hostage into Gaza. The morgues are overwhelmed with the number of the dead, doctors and nurses are overwhelmed with the number of the wounded, and everyone is bracing for what is yet to come.

I sketched the empty Gordon pool.

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.

The bad news, the dead and the wounded keep piling up. Today also added the first shortages in groceries, medication rationing and another spike in wild rumours — and also in civic attempts to help each other out. There is still hope, there are still good people in the world.

Sketched these yesterday and today in between endlessly refreshing the news.

These are cosplayers from the local chapter of the 501st Legion cosplaying at the Icon convention last week. I sketched this to remember better days. (De Atramentis Document Ink Green Grey with a TWSBI ECO 1.1 nib)

Today’s was a bearded iris, sketched with my beat up Lamy 2000 and Diamine Safari ink.