Living Under the Shadow of Missiles

Living in Israel at this time is not easy. We are all weary. Air raid sirens wail two or three times every night getting us running from our beds to our bomb shelters and saferooms. My step-daughter, Miri, lives with her husband in a second-floor apartment in Tel Aviv with her 9 and 12-year old sons. Waking them up in the middle of the night to run down two flights of stairs to the bomb shelter within 90 seconds is no easy task. Getting them back to bed and to sleep after that is even harder.

After a couple of nights of that, they moved to my home, where I have a reinforced saferoom, which I normally use as an office. We have put a double mattress on the floor and the children sleep there. When there is an air raid siren, Miri and I join them in the saferoom, which is built of reinforced concrete, has an iron shutter over the window and a heavy metal door. We wait there for 10-15 minutes until the IDF Home Guard tells us that we can leave the saferoom and we return to our beds. As you can imagine, we are all exhausted.

The children have school lessons via the Internet as in the days of Covid-19. The 9-year old had a violin lesson today using WhatsApp.

We hear of the destruction caused by the incoming rockets. Today Soroka University Medical Center in Beersheva was hit. Each night as we sit in our saferoom, where we can still hear the thud of the interceptors launched by the IDF against the incoming missiles, we hear reports from Magen David Adom ambulance service and the police about the dead and injured and the colossal damage caused to people’s homes.

Today I went out into my garden for a breath of fresh air and found a piece of buckled metal from an Iranian missile that had been intercepted. Fortunately, we had been in our saferoom at the time.