How many times a day do sirens ring out across northern Israel?
And what is it like to know you are only temporarily not the bullseye on the target?
I have been holding back. I don’t want the frequency of my posts to rain down on you like the buzzing of the app on my smartphone that tells me each time a warning siren is going off somewhere in the country even if not where I am.
But here I am. Letting you know what it feels like. Even if my house is not a target (for the moment). I’ll say something about “for the moment” in a bit.
Last night, as we slept (those who manage to sleep through the night), the IDF Telegram account uploaded this announcement:
Eilat is way far away from me — all the way at the other end of the country, 438 km away (4 1/2 hours by car or 6+ hours by bus). How far away would YOU consider that where you live?
What went on in northern Israel today?
Today, the North_Media account on Telegram has been posting multiple announcements like this one since 11:00 this morning. It is now 16:30. It says that an enemy drone invaded Israeli airspace over four sites (specified in the announcement) and residents are instructed to enter shelters and stay there for ten minutes, unless an additional warning siren goes off. Soon we will see how often this happened today by the time I finish writing this article.
Sometimes there is notification of a missile or drone having been intercepted when no siren had been sounded. For example, I missed an incident entirely, both on the app and in real life — I must have had my earphones on listening to something else. Only after I decided to write this article because of the sheer number of warning sirens, I saw that, just after 11 this morning, booms were heard along the coast from Haifa to Nahariya. That usually means that incomings were intercepted and, according to their trajectories, they did not appear to be expected to land in populated areas. For Haifa, and I supppose other towns along the coast, that often means that they are headed toward the sea. I have heard those interceptions on other occasions, usually when outside the house.
I told this to author and fellow substacker Clifford Sobin when he met me for coffee at my kiosk on the beach near my home. He got the sense of things, as he wrote in his recent article.
It is a bit unsettling for me. I don’t know if it is for others. For me, knowing something is headed from Lebanon toward Haifa (and I live near the beach) and I might not even know about it until after the fact does not necessarily give me a great deal of confidence.
In any case, there were multiple sirens in the north this afternoon. I could not find information regarding the number of missiles or drones involved in each incident. Sometimes there are only a few (“only”) and other times there can be up to 50 or more.
Let me show you what happened today. This is what it looked like from 11 am until the time of this writing:
And here is what it looks like on the map for some of these:
And:
While others may feel differently, I want to give you an idea of what it feels like to me to see what is happening just north of me. I told you Eilat is over 4 hours away by car — Nahariya is only a half-hour drive away and I sometimes meet friends for coffee there and drive back. I think meeting friends for coffee in Toronto can often entail a longer drive than that — and that is within the same city!
Here is what the distance looks like for the first map above — and I purposefully zoomed out a lot so you can also see Gaza and Jordan on this same map:
“For the Moment”
I don’t know if you will think this is silly or not, but every morning I wake up amazed and pleased that there were no sirens during the night to wake me up.
As if Hizbollah knew that I was writing this article right now, they uploaded a warning video that validates my sense that we in Haifa are not being targetting “for the moment” only.
At the end of the video there is text in Hebrew that says: “Let this enemy take note, settlers that remain in their settlements will be killed, and whoever evacuates will not be able to return. Terror from the north.”
By “settlers” and “settlements” they mean everyone in the country, including those in Haifa and Tel Aviv and everywhere else. While those opposed to Jews living in Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank) refer to THOSE Jews as settlers in settlements that are illegitimate in their eyes, thinking that peace will result from getting them out of there (as we got all Jews out of Gaza), to Hamas and Hezbollah, ALL Jews are settlers. And ALL Jews have to be got rid of. Did I hear someone say “genocide?”
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