It’s been a difficult 24 hours for Israel. On Saturday night about 200 people were injured in the southern cities of Arad and Dimona after air defence systems failed to intercept projectiles. At least 10 people, including young children, were seriously hurt.
The rockets fell in the area of the Dimona nuclear reactor, Israel’s most sensitive site. Iranian state media said the strikes were carried out in response to alleged attacks by the US and Israel on nuclear facilities in Bushehr and Natanz. Israel denied carrying out any strike on Natanz.
On Sunday morning, a resident of Misgav Am, on the northern border with Lebanon, was killed when a Hizbullah rocket hit his car. In Tel Aviv, a few hours later, 15 more people were injured from an Iranian cluster bomb.
Support for the war remains high but people are exhausted. The fourth week of incessant rocket attacks has taken its toll and there is still no end in sight. The worst-hit area is along the northern border with Lebanon, where 100-150 rockets are fired daily on average.
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The public has already been told that the weeklong festival of Passover, which begins next week, will also be spent in bomb shelters.
Sirens are random but go off every few hours, depending on where you live, night and day. A night without a siren is a blessing. Schools remain closed, along with many workplaces, meaning parents who can work from home must do so while simultaneously entertaining the kids. Israelis now plan their daily routine making sure they never stray too far from a bomb shelter.
The instructions if a siren sounds when you are driving is to stop the car, turn off the engine and lie down a safe distance from the vehicle with your hands covering your head. Non-essential travel is kept to an absolute minimum. A trip to the supermarket to stock up: yes; visiting friends: no, particularly if they live far away.
It seems that Iran has worked out the formula for wearing down the Israeli civilian population. Sirens are sounding across Israel with growing frequency, and in some cases, early mobile phone warnings have instructed residents to remain close to protected spaces, only for no siren to follow.
In the first two days of the war, Iran launched about 100 missiles towards Israel. Since then there has been a steady decline in the number of missiles fired in each barrage, in some cases involving only one or two.
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The mass salvos of the previous two rounds with Iran have been replaced with 12-15 missiles a day, in multiple separate waves, triggering more alerts over wider territory. The result: Israelis spend a lot of the day running to safe rooms and bomb shelters.
Israel’s multilayered air defence systems intercept about 92 per cent of incoming projectiles but that still means one or two will penetrate every day on average. The ballistic rockets are enormous and can destroy entire complexes of buildings. The debris from an intercept can be the size of a car.
A new feature in this war has been Iran’s use of cluster missiles, which carry multiple smaller explosives that disperse over many kilometres, significantly increasing the likelihood of civilian casualties and damage. Once a missile’s warhead opens, some 7-10km above ground, and disperses between 20-80 smaller explosives, they are extremely difficult to intercept.
A war-weary, jittery nation tries to maintain a semblance of normalcy among all this, repeating the mantra that maybe, just maybe, if this conflict leads to regime change in Iran, Israel may finally know some quiet.
