On the night of March 10-11, sleep had ceased to be real sleep for Merav. It had become only a brief pause between one siren and the next. Five times that night, she woke in alarm, roused her two daughters, ages eight and 11, gathered them up half-asleep and led them down six flights of stairs to the building’s shelter.
There, beneath harsh fluorescent lights, among drowsy neighbors, children wrapped in blankets, phones in hand, and restless dogs, they waited for the danger to pass—and then returned to their apartment, only to discover that before long it was all beginning again.
“The moment the alert comes through on our phones, we rush to wake the girls and head down to the shelter,” Merav says. “At night, that’s when it’s hardest.”
Since the war began, the threat sending Israelis into shelters has involved more than just “ordinary” ballistic missiles carrying warheads weighing hundreds of kilograms.
Even those are unlike the missiles familiar from Israel’s other fronts against Hezbollah, Hamas, or the Houthis: they are heavier, faster, more destructive, and more difficult to intercept. According to recent reports, Iran has also launched missiles carrying separating warheads that disperse sub munitions over a wide area—effectively a form of cluster bomb.
While Merav and her daughters sit on mattresses in the shelter, Israel’s multilayered air-defense umbrella is at work above them. Arrow 3 is designed to intercept ballistic missiles outside the atmosphere. Arrow 2 operates in the upper layers of the atmosphere. David’s Sling is used, among other things, against medium-range ballistic threats. Alongside them, the American THAAD system, deployed in Israel, is also helping reinforce defenses against ballistic missiles.
But no technical description of interception systems can erase the feeling of imminent danger. Three days earlier, part of an Iranian missile struck only about 30 meters—roughly 100 feet—from Merav’s home.
For Merav, the strain is measured not only by the number of sirens, but by the gradual unraveling of daily life.
“On average, there are eight to 10 sirens a day, and each time, we stay in the shelter for almost half an hour, sometimes longer,” she says. “Daily routine is disrupted again and again because of the alerts, but at night it’s the hardest.”
She and her husband work from home, and their daughters are with them. Life now unfolds between open laptops, phone alerts, a bag packed by the door, and sleep interrupted again and again.
Amid the exhaustion, she insists on speaking about strength.
“We feel positive and strong, and we act from an understanding that there is no other choice,” she says.
For her, going down to the shelter is not only an emergency response, but also an expression of emotional endurance.
“Anyone who knows Israelis knows that they want to live in peace with anyone who wants the same,” she says.
“But we are also not afraid to fight those who threaten to destroy us. We are a strong people, one that has developed willpower and resilience through decades of war. No threat will break us.”
A Shared Experience
Merav’s story is not only about a prolonged threat, but also about what happens among people forced to wait together. The shelter— in ordinary times a technical, empty, and unremarkable space—has become a place of unexpectedly human connection.
“On a personal level, going down to the shelter is a truly rare opportunity to get to know the neighbors,” she says. “While we’re there, you meet every kind of person—families with children, elderly residents, singles, and dogs too—and everyone gets along in a remarkably harmonious way.”
For Racheli, 42, her first memory of the current conflict begins with the morning of Feb. 28. “At around 8:30, the first alert sounded, signaling that the Israeli-American operation in Iran had begun,” she says.
“You can’t say it surprised anyone, because we had already been preparing for the possibility of a strike for about a month.”
Early warnings that arrive on cellphones several minutes before sirens blare fundamentally change the experience of waiting, she says. They give people time to prepare, grab a blanket, and head to the shelter without unnecessary panic.
“It seems we’ve become fairly used to the situation already; things have become orderly and clear,” she says. “We set up mattresses for sleeping and sitting in the shelter, the children play together, and sometimes they even sleep there together. It creates a unique kind of togetherness.”
For Racheli, the shelter has also become a place of belonging. She was still relatively new to the building, but gathered with other residents in the shelter, she stopped being “the new neighbor.”
“Personally, I got to know the neighbors because of this time together,” she says, before adding: “Sometimes I actually found myself waiting for the next siren so I could see everyone.”
Humor, it turns out, also finds its way inside. One evening, wrapped in a blanket on a mattress in the shelter, she opened her eyes and found a dog staring at her from inches away.
“I leaned my head back and started giggling at the situation,” she recalls. “But then I realized there was another dog to my left staring at me too, and at that point I burst into laughter.”
That moment, she says, changed the atmosphere all at once. “Situations like that always give me a feeling of happiness and a brief moment of calm inside the tension.”
