אלינור
Israel under attack
An update
We went to visit relatives in Rehovot on Thursday afternoon. Sitting around the living room, three of us in sprightly conversation, the others heard a BOOM! Not too loud but definitely what you might call a bomb. Hmm, we said, maybe it's time to go home. Someone tried to pass it off as a construction noise but it was too late in the day for that. No, we said, it was a bomb. He has too much experience; I have none, but one knows a bomb when one hears one. Then someone rang to tell us where it fell, quite far away from us in Holon, but...
We hurried to the train station. The train for Tel Aviv was delayed for 20 minutes, no problem. The train to Ashkelon, heading toward Gaza, was full. It was Thursday and the afternoon trains are always full of people--soldiers, students--going home for the Sabbath. We prayed for their safety.
As we approached Tel Aviv we congratulated ourselves on such a smooth passage, out of harm's way. Suddenly, there was an announcement:
Everybody down on the floor, under the seats. I just let myself slide to the floor and hid my head under the half-table between the seats; the others went under the seats as much as they could. The train stopped.
We stayed that way until the all-clear sounded a few minutes later. The train proceeded to the next station. An enormous number of people came on board and we were so grateful that they weren't there when the siren went; we would never have been able to protect ourselves by going under one flimsy half-table and seats made of fabric.
One rocket landed in the town next to where we had been and one rocket landed just off shore of Tel Aviv and definitely breached a red line--no rocket has ever flown that close and we don't like it. It would seem that hoping war won't happen isn't a very effective mechanism.
We heard planes all night. We never hear planes.
cross posted from Geoffff's Bar and Grill
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