Tel Aviv, March 2, 2026. Early morning.

Two days ago, a siren woke us up around 8am. It was Saturday, so we expected to sleep late, but of course, we were ready for this unfortunate turn of events. Our flip-flops were already by the door – they have been for a while now. We ran down the stairs to our building’s air raid shelter; we know the drill only too well.

The rest of the day, we ran to the shelter a gazillion more times, all part of the Iran War pt. 2, branded by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as Operation Lion’s Roar (fierce animal + dramatic noun; he probably nicked it from an 80s Chuck Norris action flick). The Home Front Command app on our phones swiftly bounced into action and started informing us a few minutes before each siren, so we could pee before going down. Apart from those few minutes between the warning and the actual siren, Saturday was intense – we hardly had any time between visits to the shelter. We managed to grab a bite, but showering was not an option.

Then came the night. I tried to sleep in the shelter with my youngest son, together with another mum from the building and her son. We kept our coats on, wrapped the kids and ourselves in TV blankets, and popped allergy pills due to the dust. My son fell asleep, and I found myself lying on a mattress, my somatic memory harking back to long layovers on connection flights. We slept in the shelter in June as well, but it wasn’t cold then. Now my body remembered the sensation of trying to sleep in my coat on a bench in some freezing airport somewhere, many years ago.

I drifted to sleep and was awakened less than an hour later by the siren. My partner and older son, and all the neighbours, came rushing in. Everyone except the religious lady who lives on our floor – she never goes down to the shelter; she believes her prayers will keep her safe in her apartment. No matter how many times we try to convince her to join us in the shelter, she politely refuses.

Loud booms accompanied the direct hit on Tel Aviv. The missile hit within walking distance of our house. Friends of ours live even closer; their windows were shattered but they were in their safe room, so they weren’t hurt. Another couple we know was evacuated to a hotel since their apartment was destroyed.

I don’t remember how many sirens wailed during the first night. After the one at 6am, on Sunday, I stopped trying to get back to sleep. Everyone came in and sat in the dark in the shelter, like zombies, silently staring at their phones. The atmosphere was very different from that of the previous day, when kids played board games in the shelter. The night was debilitating on so many levels. I was depleted until I had a chance to pop upstairs for a quick shower (I didn’t wash my hair; you can’t take chances).

The second day and night were relatively better. Fewer sirens, more time in between, but discrepancies between alerts on different apps caused much confusion as to when to enter and exit the shelter, which is quite stressful. I try to limit my phone time to the shelter and being productive while at home; in the shelter, I read about the tragedies in Beit Shemesh and the girls’ school in Iran.

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Truth is, I was surprised that it started on Saturday. Everyone said it would start on a weekend; if the US is going to bomb a country, doing it over the weekend is strategically convenient because stock markets are closed, so Wall Street can’t immediately panic-sell in response to the news. But even so, I was certain they would wait until Monday or Tuesday, assuming Netanyahu would want to attack on Purim for the symbolic value. After all, Purim is all about a miraculous salvation from a Persian (i.e., Iranian) threat to Jews, and what would look better on Netanyahu’s resumé than recreating the Book of Esther by defeating the Iranian regime on Purim?

A few days ago, Israeli parody internet persona HaPshuta posted on Instagram, ‘Will someone just tell me if to buy a Purim costume or canned food’ and got 34.8K likes. HaPshuta’s appeal is that he/she tells it like it is. On Thursday, I was at Dizengoff Centre – Tel Aviv’s central shopping mall – where willful ignorance was the general mood. Bruria, Tel Aviv’s most popular costume shop, was packed like every year, with a kilometre-long queue and a full-blown party atmosphere inside – youngsters excitedly searching for accessories for their sexy-devil or sexy-whatever costume with godawful music blasting at dangerous decibels in the background.

Young people are naturally less stressed about danger, but Bruria was also full of mothers and kids. Moms are generally not blasé about an imminent war, but we couldn’t tell our kids: ‘Listen, there really is no point shelling out on a K-Pop Demon Hunters costume; chances are there will be a war instead of your school Purim party.’ So, we played along, although we really didn’t believe we were going to have Purim this year. The first thing my younger son said after the first siren was, ‘Oh no! What about Purim?’.

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Living through a war is awful, but strangely, when the first siren split the air, it almost felt like a relief. Waiting for war is no picnic either. If they told you that they were keeping lab rats to see how they would react to the fact that missiles might be dropped on them at any minute, you would say that it was animal abuse. In Israel, we are all lab rats.

Since Donald Trump’s ‘locked and loaded’ remark on Truth Social at the beginning of January, we (seemingly) went on with our lives as usual, each one of us knowing that another war with Iran might ignite at any minute. The US had deployed its largest Middle East airpower buildup since forever, Trump was threatening military action, Netanyahu was on board, and all we could do was watch. While many Israelis hoped – and still do – that this war would destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities and trigger the overthrow of the Iranian regime, waiting for it to start was undoubtedly stressful.

Every motorcycle zooming by or ambulance heard in the distance automatically causes every Israeli’s heart to stop for a nano-second, even without the immediate threat of a war with Iran – that’s just our conditioned reflex at work. But in the last month or two, this conditioned fear response was especially heightened. We went into fight-or-flight mode innumerable times a day. We’ve already experienced a war with Iran, less than a year ago. It wasn’t pleasant.

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A short recap of previous events from my Tel Aviv-based personal perspective: The Iran-Israel war, AKA the Twelve-Day War. It might be redundant to say this, but honestly, the Twelve-Day War was something we’ve never experienced in the Israeli home front before. We’ve already had two years of on-and-off missile attacks from Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in Yemen. We got used to that, but nothing ever came close to the war with Iran we had in June. Missiles from Iran were a whole different story. Without going into military jargon, they were bigger, stronger, louder, much more frequent, and the number of missiles launched at once was much greater. Real damage was done, houses collapsed, people were killed – this was real.

Some of our friends left Tel Aviv for hotels or sublets in safer places like Jerusalem, Zikhron Ya’akov, or Eilat. Others even fled the country through Aqaba in Jordan or via the sea, taking a boat to Cyprus and flying to Europe from there. Those were the only options since there were no flights, except for evacuation flights for foreign citizens. Those options seemed too extreme for us; we stayed at home.

The level of stress that was felt throughout Israel was generally determined by three factors: where you live (when it comes to Iran, Tel Aviv is the worst), whether you have a security room/bomb shelter or not, and whether you have kids. We’ve got two out of three stress-inducing boxes checked.

Most apartments built since the 1990s have a safe room. That’s more convenient than having to leave the apartment to go to the shelter, but in case of a direct hit, they’re not as safe as their name proclaims. We don’t have a safe room, but that’s OK; personally, I prefer a good old-fashioned underground air-raid shelter, which luckily our building has. We also have nice neighbours who pitched in to get it ready when the previous war started. During peacetime, Israelis use bomb shelters as storage rooms (although we’re not supposed to), so we removed all the junk from the shelter, cleaned it, brought in beds, mattresses, board games, mineral water bottles, and plenty of snacks. We even had Wi-Fi.

In June, we did this right after the war with Iran started; this time, we did it a week before, knowing what was coming. One piece of junk we didn’t chuck last time, and is still there, is a framed poster of Homer Simpson emulating Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’. It doesn’t get any more poignant than this.

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During those 12 days, we descended to the shelter several times a night. The Home Front Command app worked most of the time and let us know that the siren was about to go off. When it didn’t, we found ourselves running down the stairs with our hands on our heads (a strange instinctive and totally ineffective physical response) while the building was shaking from the explosions. While sitting in the shelter, we judged how close the missiles hit by the volume of the boom. Then we received information and misinformation on WhatsApp. One night, a missile destroyed a building right next to our kid’s school. Another missile destroyed a house next to our friends’ house.

COVID set up the infrastructure for working and studying remotely so that’s what we did during the days. At night, we slept (or tried to) between the sirens, like you do when you have a newborn baby at home. I’m sure many didn’t sleep at all.

After 12 days, it was over, and that was that. Everyday life resumed immediately. We’ve blocked most of this unfortunate episode out and focused on practicalities like asking our accountant about compensation for lost days in June. In Israel, you don’t have time to process, decompress, recover, recalibrate, and regroup. Specifically then, we still had hostages in Gaza to worry about. Iran was like a spin-off to the Gaza war that we were already embroiled in, so we went right back to that. Even without all that, in Israel, whenever a crisis ends, we just get on with it.

In hindsight, for the sake of our kids’ mental health, maybe we should have discussed with them what had happened and encouraged them to open up about what they went through. But we didn’t. Everyone was sent back to school the very next day, all activities resumed in a heartbeat. ‘Back to normal’ is the big thing in Israel. People who personally experienced ‘real’ loss during the Iranian attack – lost loved ones, were physically hurt, or lost their home – receive medical, psychological, and financial aid. The rest of us just got on with it. That’s the Israeli way.

To rationalise this mentality, I think we probably don’t take the time to metabolise traumatic experiences because we know the next one is just around the corner. If we have a few months, or weeks, or days or even hours before the next ordeal, we make the most of it. Even during those horrible 12 days, we spent our nights running in and out of the shelter, and in the morning, we sat in the neighbourhood café. There were very few missile attacks in the morning, so you might as well get a good cappuccino.

This time around, they are bombing us during the day, too.

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Operation Lion’s Roar started after about two months of constant worry. Different people have different levels of anxiety and different coping mechanisms. Some are more prone to self-medication, others tried to make a quick buck on Polymarket. Some were indifferent or deluded themselves into believing that they were.

Whatever the response, the possibility of war with Iran was as concrete and tangible as the possibility of rain this time of year. While stocking up on canned food seemed a bit extreme to most people I know, leaving a water bottle beside the entrance door and the key in the lock was once again common practice. In the last few weeks, people were saying things like ‘I’ll see you on Tuesday, unless there are missiles’. The war disclaimer at the end of any short-term plan had become quite ordinary, and each small decision was accompanied by calculations. I googled how fast the newest Iranian missiles are in order to decide whether to go somewhere or not.

In January, our older son had an overnight high school field trip. Naturally, I tried to get it cancelled. Some of the parents agreed with me – most didn’t. They preached on the class WhatsApp group about the importance of letting our children have a normal childhood (good luck with that, folks!) and the significance of maintaining a routine. The trip went ahead as planned. My partner checked the US strike on Iran probability for the next 8 hours on StrikeRadar – a website modelled after the Pentagon Pizza Index. The meter indicated ‘low risk’, so we let our kid go on the trip. That’s responsible parenting for you.

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Modern headlines and social media amplify our dread and make future, uncertain events feel catastrophic before they even occur, which is why many people I know stopped checking the news and social media. But they too held an opinion on when, how long, and how bad it was going to be, while some thought it wasn’t going to happen at all. In each watercooler/living room/pub discussion on the topic, people weighed in their two cents. We speculated, theorised, debated, and analysed. Ultimately, the human psyche is a wondrous thing. As the old gallows humor saying goes, you can get used to hanging if you hang long enough. And 12 days is plenty. So even though the Twelve-Day War was awful, when we speculated on what the next war with Iran would be like, we always said that we hoped it wouldn’t be worse than the previous one. That became our new benchmark.

These discussions always ended with someone saying, ‘But ultimately no one knows anything.’ Everyone nodded in agreement. Some people consider epistemic humility liberating, but in this case, I found it terrifying.

While constant apprehension became the new normal in the country, I’m proud to say I have experienced only one major panic attack since this started, which, for me, really isn’t bad. It happened about a week ago; the onset was a conversation with a friend who lives in Berlin, who was visiting his family in Israel. He called to cancel plans since he decided to immediately return to Berlin, not to get stuck in Israel if war breaks out. He apologised for canceling, and I was super nice, empathetic, and understanding. I told him I totally get it, and that of course, he’s doing the right thing. Hearing my own words was the trigger.

My fear started to rise. I was home alone. Well, actually, the kids were at home too, but they were sleeping. We were all supposed to attend a family event in the north of Israel, but I refused to go and sent my partner to go alone, so that we wouldn’t get stuck with the kids on the 2-hour drive back at night, in case there were sirens.

There were no sirens, but that phone call caused my heart to start racing and induced trembling, sweating, shortness of breath, chest pain, and dizziness. I alternated between checking every online news outlet known to humankind, hitting the refresh button at the speed of a ‘Doom Eternal’ pro. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the desire to escape and started calling every acquaintance that I perceived as a serial runaway (i.e, friends who fled the country more than once since October 7). My aim was: A. to check if other people are fleeing the country, in the hope that they will say, ‘Nah, relax, nothing is going to happen’. B. Find friends to flee together with (that’s always better for the kids).

Well-aware of how privileged this is, running away is something many Israelis have gotten used to in the last two and a half (almost) years. A few days after October 7, immediately after the outbreak of the Gaza war, we left the country, as did tens of thousands of other Israelis. Our family flew to Greece. We stayed there for a month, together with friends, and then returned. But doing so every time tension rises, is impossible. So, I had to wrap up my panic attack. I took a mild sedative and fell asleep before my partner returned from the north.

Of course, I also called him during my panic attack, demanding we get out of here asap; he said that they’re in the middle of dinner and that we’ll discuss our options in the morning. The next day, when he brought it up, I just said, ‘nevermind.’ Sometimes you are just too exhausted to run away.