I wake to loud buzzing as my cellphone flashes the alarm: “Extreme Alert!  Go to a protected space!”

It’s done this a lot over the past week, since the start of Israel’s Operation Rising Lion, but it’s unnerving every time. My “running to the shelter” clothes are already laid out. I have less than 10 minutes to get to a shelter, but there’s no way I’m facing missiles without fresh underwear. As I dress, my three daughters send messages via WhatsApp along the lines of: “Mummy, you awake?  In the shelter?”

To their displeasure, I had stayed home when Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis targeted us these past 18 months, but Iran is different.

It’s after 1:00 am, but the street is full, people moving quickly and calmly toward the public shelter. I live in Jerusalem’s Katamon neighborhood, built before saferooms were mandatory, so we all need somewhere to go.

I’ve come to know my local shelter well this week. Four large, bare spaces beneath a residential building across the road from my building, its mood is oddly uplifting. Sheltering several hundred people, the atmosphere is supportive and unified. A group sits on gym mats, playing backgammon. Parents jiggle babies, owners entertain their dogs—I’d no idea there were so many dogs in my neighborhood!

We’re infants and children; women in headscarves and women in tiny shorts; men studying holy texts and men sporting tattoos. We help one another find space to sit on plastic chairs or mattresses and exchange news. Cellphone reception doesn’t penetrate the shelter’s reinforced walls, but we’re all obsessively on our phones. And even without a signal, someone always knows when the danger is past, and we’re good to go.

We patiently file out, up the narrow stairway, atypically for Israelis urging others ahead of us and holding open the heavy shelter door for those behind us. 

As I emerge, my phone dings with WhatsApps from my daughters. Odelia is near a military airbase and sends a recording of the relentless roar of planes. Her husband is in the reserves, and in the background, I can hear her two under-4-year olds whimper. Donna writes from Raanana, where she and her husband sleep with their two babies in their saferoom. She’s heard “enormous booms and things flying at our window.” Nomi and her husband exited their saferoom one day this week to find their bedroom window cracked by the blasts and glass scattered across the bed. “I jump with every boom, wondering if we’re going to be next,” she writes.

And so, tired as we are from the broken nights, we begin each day. I shower and dry off as quickly as I can, relieved there’s been no alert. I go to the supermarket where the lines are long and the shelves a little emptier than usual, but people are uncharacteristically considerate and courteous.  We ask one another: “Which shelter do you go to?” much as we used to ask, “Which shul?” or “Which doctor?”

I hesitantly decide to keep a work meeting 15 minutes away, reassured by the Waze navigational app’s new “nearest open shelter” search feature.

A meme pops up on my phone, one of many shared in the past week: Am Yisrael Chai! Aval met lishon…. The People of Israel Live! But we’re all dying to sleep….

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Wendy Elliman is a British-born science writer who has lived in Israel for more than five decades. Long-time readers of Hadassah Magazine may remember a January 1991 article by past editor emeritus Alan Tigay that featured her daughters Odelia, Nomi and Donna. They were then 3 months old, and were sheltering in a sealed room from the Scuds that Saddam Hussein was lobbing at Israel from Iraq.