Yesterday Hila took a bus to Ashkelon where she took part in a preparatory seminar for a summer camp at which she'll be a counselor in a couple of weeks. The seminar was in a shelter, so she was able to stay there last night, but instead of coming home this evening as planned it was decided to send her and the other counselors home around noon, and I picked her up from a bus stop around 15 minutes from us, two minutes from the college where I work. But I wasn't at the college today. Classes and exams were cancelled. That doesn't really affect me, but I didn't have any meetings, and what I do I can do from home, so I had no reason to be there. I've already received word that there won't be classes or exams tomorrow either.

Yesterday evening we also had sirens, and apparently one missile landed about one kilometer from us. It was loud. Nadav phoned me a bit after it fell. He'd apparently heard about it on the phone from friends of his at a kibbutz a bit south of us where another missile had fallen.

The children's houses on Hatzor were closed today, and will be tomorrow as well. I don't know if I'll drive to the college. I'd like to get some work done at my desk there, but I'm not sure it makes enough of a difference. I rarely eat in the Hatzor dining room simply because I'm never there for lunch, but I was today, entering with Hila when we got back from picking her up. Since all the kids were with there parents (quite a number didn't go to work) the dining room was quite full, and the atmosphere was ... quite pleasant.

What else is there to report? Eitan is in India, far away from all of this, and Nadav is still stationed a bit north of Eilat - also far from it all (and of course he's occupied with his own private war with the army) and I doubt that his unit will be getting any nearer to any of the foci of action. Our television is open throughout the day. When there aren't ongoing reports of sirens or interceptions or missile landings there's incessant discussion and analysis - what should Israel do.

And it's at about this point that I find myself wondering if I have anything to write. We've been through this before. This time missiles are reaching farther north, but other than that it feels like more of the same, except perhaps that this time it seems that everybody understands that for all the talk of "once and for all" finally achieving quiet, that's not going to happen. I haven't looked (yet?) for my letters from the last time we went through this, but I doubt that I have anything new or different to say, except for being even more depressed.

(As I write [it's now 23:00] we're getting a report of Iron Dome interceptions north of us in Rishon LeTzion, and as we get this television reports we're hearing the booms from here. We didn't get sirens because the missiles weren't directed toward us. It's very real-time.)

I guess that I can't really send this without writing a bit about what seems to have brought us to this point. I think that for most of us it was clear that if after a couple of days we didn't get any ransom demands the three kidnapped Israeli youth were already dead. Still, the "final" report was depressing, and as is often the case in Israel, this was the primary issue that everyone was involved with. Concern, however, quickly changed to calls for revenge, and we know what happened next. I have numerous thoughts that I'll try to put into writing in the near future - I've been writing this for an hour now and I'm ready to rest a bit. And of course I don't really know if I've got anything new to add.

I have numerous political thoughts that I should find the time to write, though there won't be much new in them. Hamas isn't going to succeed in destroying Israel (though we may do that to ourselves). But clearly "punishing" all of Gaza isn't a very effective way of winning hearts and minds. I don't claim that that's possible, but achieving some sort of "permanent quiet" which is what most Israelis call for, while continuing the occupation, is just as impossible.