The first alarm is startling. It wakes you in the middle of the night, interrupts meals, and disrupts travel—exactly as it’s designed to. This is the early warning from Home Front Command: missiles have been fired from Iran, but their exact trajectory isn’t yet known. The warning gives you roughly ten minutes to prepare for a possible second alarm—the one that triggers the siren and gives you just ninety seconds to reach a shelter once the system knows where the missiles are headed.
To give a sense of what those ten minutes feel like, here are a few personal observations, moving from the least to the most frightening.
Surprisingly, the middle‑of‑the‑night alerts were the least scary for me. Everything I needed was already beside my bed. I’d jump up, put on my glasses, shoes, and jacket (with pockets preloaded), grab the baby’s backpack—my assigned job—unlock the front door, and wait for the second alert before running to the shelter.
On one midday outing, I stopped into a neighbor’s lobby during the warning period, and an elderly Romanian woman invited me to walk with her to the shelter. She couldn’t make it there in ninety seconds, so she used the ten‑minute window each time to get herself safely inside. We never received the second alert, but we shared a warm, unexpected visit while we waited.
A similar plan unfolded on a Shabbat morning in synagogue. With the government‑mandated limit of fifty people, the gabbai announced that if an early warning came, we would use the ten‑minute window to move calmly and orderly to the shelter rather than scramble during the ninety‑second rush. Fortunately, no alarms sounded.
On another midday outing, I was sitting at an outdoor café, when we received the ten-minute warning alarm. During that time, we learned that the nearest shelter was in the basement of the supermarket across the street. When the ninety‑second alert came, the sudden flurry of movement—in the café, on the sidewalk, in the street, in the market—sent a jolt of adrenaline through me. One moment people were sipping coffee; the next, chairs scraped back, conversations cut off mid‑sentence, and everyone surged toward the crosswalk at once.
Once, I was driving six minutes from the mall when the alert came. I made it safely, parked quickly, and ran straight into the mall’s shelter.
But the scariest moment came on a drive to Jerusalem, traveling in two cars. My car happened to be inside a tunnel when the early warning sounded, so we waited there with dozens of other vehicles. The second car had already exited the tunnel; they pulled onto a sidewalk in front of a yeshiva and ran into its shelter. Being caught on the open road—exposed, with nowhere obvious to go—is a feeling that stays with you. It also explains why so many Israelis have chosen not to travel during this war.
What these ten‑minute intervals ultimately reveal is that the real target isn’t only infrastructure or military sites—it’s the civilian mind. The missiles may or may not land, but the uncertainty always does. The early warning forces you to stop whatever you’re doing, gather your family, and brace for the possibility of a sprint to safety. It’s a deliberate strategy: to disrupt daily life, to inject fear into ordinary routines, to make people think twice about driving, sleeping, shopping, praying, or simply being outside. That is the essence of terrorism—not just the potential for physical harm, but the steady pressure on civilians to live in a state of vigilance, never fully sure whether the next sound will be the all‑clear or the siren.
And somehow, despite it all, it’s Israeli resilience that keeps life moving forward.