Haifa: A day in the life

Just a normal day during a war

One day in my life, from midnight to midnight, even though I experience my days from any time between 0400 and 0700 until 0100 the next day (yup, that’s how I sleep, with a deep afternoon nap in-between). What was my one day like yesterday? And what will today bring?

---

I want to let you in on a little secret. I started this essay last night. Just couldn’t type out more than the title. I expected to get up full of energy in the morning and write it up during my first coffee and have it all done and ready to check for spelling mistakes and such by 10:00. It is now 14:30 and I am having to push myself to finish it. And I will finish it, I promise myself.

My morning energy reserves emptied very quickly. I feel lethargic. My brain feels like it is in deep-freeze.

Writing is usually so energizing for me, so satisfying. I love searching for exactly the right word. I love reading what I have written, hearing in my head the sometimes well-put-together phrase that makes me proud of myself. Right now, I am wondering how coherent I will be but I am still pushed by this inner voice that keeps me typing away, hoping that my musings will make sense and perhaps even have meaning for some of my readers.

And together with this, tears escape from my eyes, sometimes one at a time, sometimes flowing a whole bunch of them at once, sometimes fogging my eyes, leaving me wondering how much crying is in me.

I ascribe what is happening to me now as the result of stresses from the scenes of Oct 7th and the follow-up war in Gaza with all its losses of beautiful young Israelis and horror for the hostages not yet home, the stresses of the re-emergence of fractures in Israeli society that had come together as one for a brief wondrous period of time after Oct 7th, stresses of the months of war of attrition up north that is so draining on everyone, stresses of waiting for it to burst forth into overt noisy warfare so we can get it over and done with, fear of what will happen to us as we are getting it over and done with, stresses of having four people I love and two dogs I am also quite fond of living with me for two months solid after decades of me living alone….and now let me get back to it.

---

First, a bit of context. Yesterday, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari opened his statement to the Israeli public thus (see entire video in English here):

Since October 8th, Hezbollah has launched over 9,000 rockets, missiles, and UAVs targeting Israeli families, homes, and communities. In the past week alone, more than 700 rockets and UAVs have struck deep inside Israel, forcing hundreds of thousands of citizens into bomb shelters. For years, Hezbollah has been planning to replicate in northern Israel what Hamas did in the south on October 7th—an invasion, infiltration of civilian communities, and the massacre of innocent civilians. To accomplish this, they devised a strategy called "Conquer the Galilee."

Here is a summary of yesterday’s attacks. Details are from a number of sources and I hope to be as accurate as possible.

4:45-4:54: 3 sirens in southern Golan in response to one drone that crossed into Israel from Iraq. Successful interception.

6:31, 8:36, 9:35, and 11:30: 2, 6, 10, and 4 sirens in Upper Galilee, all instances turned out to be false alarms

12:19: One siren in Confrontation Line. Details still under review (for unstated reason)

12:24: 25 sirens in the Upper Galilee, Lower Galilee and Confrontation Line; 25 drones and rockets mostly intercepted successfully but there were a number of “nefilot” (projectiles that were unsuccessfully intercepted and landed) in open areas

12:43: 16 sirens in sites in Lower Galilee, Center Galilee, HaHamakim, and the Confrontation Line; 10 nefilot in Lower Galilee area

13:17 and 13:23: two sirens in the Confrontation Line; false alarms

14:30: 11 sirens in two regions in the Confrontation Line communities; false alarms

15:26: alarm in one site in the Confrontation Line; false alarm

16:15: 32 sirens sounded in Lower Galilee, Upper Galilee, HaAmakim, HaCarmel, HaMifratz (towns and kibbutzim north of Haifa), and the Confrontation Line. 10 missiles identified, some successfully intercepted and some fell in open areas

16:45: 11 sirens in Center and Lower Galilee regions; 25 missiles, some intercepted and some fell in open areas

17:02-17:04: 25 sirens in sites along the Mediterranean coast north of Haifa up to just below Nahariya and four sirens in the Confrontation Line; 15 missiles in the former and 25 in the latter; one false alarm. Numerous interceptions and nefilot in open areas

17:15: 23 sirens in Samaria communities (on the east side of the Green Line); all 10 missiles fell in open areas

17:20- 17:23: about 45 sirens went off in communities in Lower and Central Galilee, Wadi Ara, HaAmakim, and HaCarmel; 35 missiles, many intercepted, some fell in open areas

17:41: under 40 sirens went of in HaMifratz, HaCarmel, HaAmakim, Wadi Ara, and Center Galilee; five missiles identified, some intercepted, some fell in open areas

[As I write this, Hezbollah started pounding us again, and not far from Haifa, but that is for a separate note.]

18:04: under 40 sirens in HaAmakim, Wadi Ara, HaCarmel, Center Galilee; 5 missiles identified, some intercepted, some fell in open areas

18:56-19:00: about 70 sirens went off in Center Galilee, HaAmakim, Wadi Ara, Upper Galilee, HaMifratz; 25 missiles identified, most successfully intercepted, nefilot in open areas

19:43: about 26 sirens went off in various neighbourhoods of Haifa (including my own), in HaCarmel communities, and HaMifratz; five missiles identified and either intercepted or fell in open areas. One landed near Haifa University.

After that, Hezbollah called it a day. He started up again at 2:00 this morning, but that already was a new day.

In all, there were about 380 sirens yesterday, sending Israelis, Jews and Arabs, running for shelter. Of these, 37 were false alarms. 211 missiles and drones were either intercepted or fell in open areas. These are the figures I was able to get and I do not promise they are 100% accurate. One report said there were some injuries from shrapnel but no details were provided. This stands in contrast to three injuries and one fatal car accident when 85 missiles were launched into Israel the previous day.

---

Someone in my building just slammed a door real hard and my heart dropped — it sounded like a boom high in the sky. Car doors slamming shut will do this, a truck going too fast over a speed bump will do this. Ah. Those triggers that I remember from previous wars and had already got over. Those little noises that generally go unregistered by our conscious minds now make us (well, me) stop in our (my) tracks and question their origins. Hypervigilence is the term for it.

---

Over 200 missiles and drones into Israel on one day is a huge amount, especially in view of the fact that Hagari said there were 700 projectiles launched into Israel the previous week.

My Day

I am usually home during the day. As I wrote elsewhere, my daughter’s family is staying with me while their apartment is being renovated. The kids go to school and I stay home with the dogs (I will not have them stay home alone in my place) which means that I cannot go anywhere until either my daughter or her husband get home. One of the dogs cannot be tied up outside the grocery store and will not sit quietly by my side in an outdoor coffee shop. So I am home with them.

Now that Haifa schools have joined the northern schools that are closed, my grandkids are here all day as well. I will not leave them alone as long as there is any chance of an alert.

My son-in-law was supposed to be home yesterday morning so I made important plans in Hadera. His work called him in unexpectedly and the only solution to my unavailability was for the kids to go to their grandfather in Haifa and, because he won’t have the dogs, they were put in daycare in a kennel in Isfiya, a Druze town just outside of Haifa.

I returned to a blissfully empty home at about 14:00 and two hours later, the bombardments began to hit areas farther south than Hezbollah had previously targetted. They seemed to be aiming everywhere except Haifa.

It was intense and I contacted friends to see how they were doing. Some have shelters in their building basements or a mamad (shelter in one’s apartment) and others stand in stairwells, at least one floor above the ground and two floors below the highest floor. If the stairwell has windows or an external wall, that is not even a great solution. Two friends sought shelter with family nearby.

My grandchildren came home at about 17:00 and my daughter drove to Isfiya to get the dogs. At 17:41, when I checked where the sirens were going off, I saw that Isfiya was one of the places. My daughter was there picking up the dogs. At the time, I didn’t know if she was in the car with them and I was worried about how she could handle that potentially very dangerous situation.

She told me that the alarm sounded when she was at the kennel collecting the dogs. There was no shelter so they just waited it out inside the kennel yard. No protection, nothing. Not much better than being caught on the road.

As you can see in the list of attacks above, between 500K and a million people, or more, were simultaneously scurrying off to shelter during the attacks that took place when my daughter’s family were home with me.

Then, at 19:42, when my daughter and her husband were out with the dogs, the siren went off in my neighbourhood in Haifa. My grandkids, 8 and 11, were calm and briskly came to where I had told them our safe “spot” was in the apartment.

My Safe spot

I live on the ground floor of a two-story apartment building. None of the apartments have a mamad and there is no bomb shelter.

My living room is an open space surrounded on all sides but one by walls to other rooms and the wall between my apartment and my neighbour’s. The entrance to the kitchen and sun room is wide and without a door, but the window in the sun room is about 12 meters from the spot where I sit (under a support beam) and at such an angle that if it does shatter, the shards will not come anywhere near me.

I feel safe enough: if a missile lands in my area, there is a good chance that we will feel little other than the building shaking and perhaps things falling off shelves and broken windows. If one lands beside my building or in my yard, there can be serious damage to my apartment, but I should be safe in the inner space with no external walls. On the other hand, if a missile comes through the roof, I would have to be very lucky not to get hurt. Shrapnel from an intercepted missile may damage the apartment above me but not get to me.

Imagine that you live in such an apartment and multiply that by thousands for all those Israelis who have neither bomb shelters nor mamads and no safe stairwell in which to sit out the alerts. Calculations for how to be safest have to be made and, waiting for Nasralleh to decide whether or not to hit Haifa, I, and many like me, could only pray that either our neighbourhood would not be attacked or that we would be safe enough in our little corners.

The Alert

The alert was weak, loud enough to be heard and for us to be sure it was meant for us, but for some reason, not the bone-chilling soul-vibrating ups and downs that I hate so much. My grandson looked up from his tablet with a knowing look and got up calmly and walked to our safe spot. My granddaughter appeared from nowhere at the same time. I pulled up the closest chair after having brought my thick winter blanket from my room. They sat on the floor at my feet.

I covered the three of us with the blanket and told them that if there were things falling off the closest shelf or plaster from the walls or whatever, it would not scratch us. We counted the booms and I told them these were likely interceptions. They were quite loud. The kids were curious about interceptions and nefilot and what happens when a missile lands. The conversation was relaxed.

Pretty soon there was a phone call from their father. I told him we were in a tent and the kids laughed. There was no anxiety, perhaps incomprehensible to many readers given that we were well aware that someone was aiming missiles at us and we had to be in a safe place. When ten minutes had passed, they threw off the blanket and went back to what they had been doing before that moment in another dimension.

Had the kids not been with me, I would have been watching some TV news programme with talking heads interpreting what we were going through. It was better with the kids there, laughing and talking under a blanket tent.

Not knowing what the next hours would bring, everyone had showers, ate dinner, did bedtime ritual as if nothing had happened and nothing was going to happen.

And the house went dark and quiet as everyone but me went to sleep. I put on a movie on my smartphone to keep my mind occupied as I worked on a macrame piece. And when I was sufficiently weary, I went to bed too.

Nasrallah let us sleep through the night. Us, but not everyone in the north. Sirens went off at 02:30, 03:00, and then more frequently since 07:00 in various places. Just an hour ago, about 30 sirens sounded in places near Haifa, but not IN Haifa.

I feel like I have it easy. I cannot imagine what it is like to have sirens every day or almost every day, and several times a day. But this is what it was like for me, yesterday.

---

Israel is not supported on the Substack payment platform; therefore, I set up a way to make one-time donations or ongoing subscriptions in your own currency using Paypal (Buy me a Coffee, below) or the Ko-fi payment platform here. Israelis can send me a private message for another option.

Articles will always be free for all subscribers but a paid subscription or donation is a way to help me sustain myself while doing all the work involved in putting these articles together and would be greatly appreciated.

Thank-you to all those who have supported my work by subscribing and/or by donating coffees.