The Sirens of War: Counting Israel’s Missile Alerts

At 3:47 a.m. on September 13, 2025, the wail of Israel’s Home Front Command sirens awakened my wife and me and sent us racing for shelter. Since making Aliyah in 2017, we have lived with these warnings as a constant feature of daily life. What once felt exceptional has become routine.

In an effort to quantify this routine, I sought out data. The best estimates suggest that since 2017, Israelis have endured between 50,000 and 80,000 rocket and missile sirens. Each represents an attempt by Iran or one of its proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis—to strike civilian areas. Israel’s defense systems, supplemented by assistance from allies, have spared the country from catastrophic loss of life. Yet the intent of these barrages is unmistakable: to terrorize, abduct, and kill.

Israel has responded with force. Its campaigns have targeted those responsible in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and even Iran. But the cycle of attack and counterattack has also left civilians across the region—Israeli, Palestinian, Lebanese, Yemeni, and Iranian—grieving losses that are at once tragic, unnecessary, and preventable. It has left Israeli hostages, both living and dead, languishing in hell.

Debates over how this conflict began will never yield consensus. Far more urgent is the question of how it ends. Neither missile defenses nor military strikes can substitute for leadership. The only durable resolution will come when political will surpasses the will to wage war.

Until that day, the sirens will continue to sound—measuring the cost of delay in sleepless nights, shattered lives, and a region held hostage by violence. This war will end only when political will proves stronger than the will to kill. The war will end only when political will trumps death.