I took refuge in a stairwell
Air raid sirens wailed all over Tel Aviv shortly after 9 p.m. on Tuesday. It takes a few seconds to process, grab shoes, loved ones, keys, phone, dash to the stairwell. And wait. We have 60-90 seconds to get to safety from the first siren sound.
In older residential buildings like the one in which I live there are no bomb shelters or safe rooms so the stairwells do the trick. An impromptu gathering of people with whom, until now, you exchanged passing pleasantries. A few seem to be on the verge of mild breakdowns, some want to talk incessantly and ask questions of me as if I have answers, a young boy cries into his dad’s shoulder because his mom is out at a café and they can’t reach her.
Most are chill. Sit. Wait, Even the dogs. A neighbour offers tea.
This attack, though, is unprecedented. As promised, Hamas pounded Tel Aviv and environs with more than 130 rockets fired from Gaza within about a half hour. Earlier in the day they had hammered the southern city of Ashkelon with the same number of rockets in five minutes, due to its proximity to launch sites.
The new Hamas strategy, which is not ineffective, is to overwhelm Israel’s Iron Dome defensive system which tracks incoming missiles, determines their landing spot and decides whether to shoot down the missive. All this interplay between humans and systems occurs within seconds. Mistakes are rare. But if a rocket is on a trajectory to land in an open area, it continues uninterrupted. No need to waste a super expensive battery on something that will not threaten civilians.
About four hours into the meeting it finally came up: The conversation slowwwwwly veered into how the public thought he was … losing his mind. — Seth rogen, book, from his new recounts an odd meeting with tom cruise. fp16
It’s the rockets aimed at densely populated areas that are a priority to neutralize. And, for the most part, Israel was successful in doing so last night. There were direct hits on homes and cars and buildings; and yes, there were casualties, three Israelis were killed. But that is immeasurably fewer than if we had been cowering in stairwells without Iron Dome.
It has been years since we’ve heard rockets in Tel Aviv — not since 2014 — but the sounds are so familiar: the unique whistle of a rocket and then a BOOM. A very loud boom, that no matter where it explodes, it always sounds like it’s a few metres away. Several clearly were very close to us, as there is rocket debris steps from our home and, likely, scattered all over Tel Aviv.
After 45 minutes or so we returned to our apartments and tuned into the news with the rest of Israel. “Operation Guard the Ramparts” (hey, it sounds better in Hebrew, way less medieval) is feeling ambiguous. The Home Front Commander issued very careful and precise directives with respect to how to conduct ourselves in the next few days, stressing that this will likely not end quickly.
His warnings were echoed in a short TV appearance by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Minister of Defence Benny Gantz, as well as Israel Defence Force chief of staff Aviv Kochavi. In brief remarks they emphasized that this campaign will be comprehensive and will take some time. That seems to mean they are expecting Hamas to continue to attack high value targets like Tel Aviv.
Doing so achieves a critical Hamas goal: it ensures that Israel will strike back with full military might, resulting in Palestinian casualties and the western media will, on cue, present Israel as the aggressor and the calls will come along for Israel to show “restraint”.
Which is always a tough one. When a terrorist proxy of Iran attacks, unprovoked, a civilian population, what, exactly, is restraint? It seems the world promotes one understanding of what might constitute appropriate defensive conduct for all countries, and another absurd standard for Israel.
How did this begin? Hamas opportunistically chose to leverage the recent unrest in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Shiekh Jarrah and on the al Aqsa compound to assert their leadership as being foremost in defending the honour of Islam in Israel. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad know they will not destroy Israel, as they proclaim, but they are also well aware that they are turning heads in the radicalized Arab world and showing courage and leadership in challenging the “Zionist aggressor.”
Experts watching this unusual turn of events are somewhat flummoxed. When Hamas engages so aggressively it is usually tied to a specific outcome: more money, greater flow of goods through industrial crossings. This time, the only demand is less specific.
Hamas issued an ultimatum recently to Israel, to have all Israeli police and soldiers removed from the al Aqsa plaza or else … they would strike at the heart of Israel, meaning, Tel Aviv. Al Aqsa has been used throughout Ramadan for stockpiling weapons and rocks used to attack Israeli police and, sometimes, Jewish worshippers at the wailing wall plaza below.
The Sheikh Jarrah situation, where families await a court ruling on eviction, has been misrepresented as a grotesque land grab, but it really is a pedestrian landlord-tenant dispute, that happens to involve Palestinians and Israelis. It is complex and has been ongoing for 40 years.
There is consensus that Hamas fully expected its ultimatums to be ignored, raising the question, again, why engage in such a robust show of force at this time?
There is speculation that internal power struggles within Hamas are partially the cause of this latest round of rocket attacks; rivals jostling for position. Another possibility is that they see this as an opportunity to influence the Biden administration to pay greater attention to the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
International pressure on Israel to “de-escalate” will grow as casualties on both sides mount. Yet there is no real expectation that Hamas will back down until forced to do so, by Israel, militarily. Hamas is not a conventional army, but a well-organized guerrilla force that uses residential buildings as munitions depots and civilians as human shields. Would that the international community was more focused on that egregious war crime.
In Israel, we wait. Stay close to home and loved ones. And safe shelters. We make sure we have the provisions we need for a few days and are ever alert for the wail of the siren, because it will surely wail again.
As it did early Wednesday, at 3 a.m., for another round of blasts.