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Never a dull moment!
We left Nir-Oz at 16:45, and a bit to our surprise by 17:45 we were already unlocking our door and unpacking our few bags when ... a get-to-your-safe-rooms siren went off - without a preliminary alert. The drive ordinarily takes about an hour and a quarter, but the roads were open and we made very good time (I think it takes longer to get there than to get back). That's certainly lucky for us because we really didn't want to get caught in an alert while we were on the road. By 18:05 we were already out. While in our safe room the news told us that there really hadn't been a preliminary alert, at least not in our area, for some logical logistic reason which we don't fully understand. It's now 18:15, and I've unpacked my laptop (and everything else) and I wanted to speedily note this up-to-the-minute update. I'll report on our day a bit later.
It looks like this is going to be a play-by-play report. For the past hour, since I ended my last paragraph, I've been quietly dealing with some archive related things, and then at 19:30 we again had a siren even before the preliminary alert. So I started this paragraph from our safe room. While here, waiting for the all clear, we had another warning, though this one seems to be outside of our area. We're still waiting.
That episode was over after about fifteen minutes - a bit longer than usual because it wasn't clear if the second alert influenced us. It didn't. Since then we've had a quiet evening, giving me time to continue this report.
I'm linking here a short video from last night. Hila thinks it's a poor representation of her singing so she requests not to pass it on. I'm sending it because it gives a picture of our seder. BTW, last night the sky over Nir-Oz, like pretty much all the rest of Israel, was overcast, and even rainy. For the first time since I can remember we didn't see the moon, nor remark about how lucky we were that we had a full moon for our seder.
This morning I was washing dishes when I saw, through the kitchen window, that Liat Atzili and her parents were walking by the house. Liat is, I guess, a well -known hostage from Nir-Oz. Her husband was killed the first day of the war. She was released in the first hostage release. Her parents are members of Kibbutz Shomrat - from the garin that I would have been a member of had I stayed with that group (Liat is the first child of that American garin). I hardly know them, but our paths crossed before my aliyah, via the Radical Zionist Alliance, and perhaps a couple of times since then when I've visited Shomrat. So I went outside to greet them. I wasn't surprised that they didn't recognize me, but Liat explained to them that I was Hila's father. Tzippi and Hila had met them earlier on their walk and Hila had apparently spoken with her, and they've had contact around Yom HaShoah programming. I like the idea of no longer being identified as the former executive secretary of the RZA, but instead as Hila's father.
A bit after that I brought some of our bags to the car, and at the same time I took a short walk. While walking I decided to shoot a short video - starting at a destroyed house from which members were kidnapped (and perhaps killed) and ending at the newly built house where Hila now lives. It's a short distance, and I guess the message is obvious.
At about 12:45 we drove, along with Hila, to a community about twenty minutes to the south where Tal, a very close friend of Eitan's, lives. Tal has a separate unit next to his mother's house, and it seems that some of his brothers and sisters have them as well. His younger brother was killed the first day of the war. Eitan is there often, and we'd never met Tal, nor his mother who to a large extent has adopted him. We planned for a short visit, maybe tea and cake, and in the end we were there for about three hours, including lunch, along with all the brothers and sisters and their spouses. We have an open invitation to return, and I'm sure we'll be graciously welcomed, though I don't know when we'll be there again. We brought Hila back to Nir-Oz and then headed for home ... which brings me up to where this report started.
While I've been writing we saw the end of the news, and now the television is simply on. Tzippi is dozing, and I've continued to write. At 21:45 the news noted that over the past 24 hours over 150 missiles had been launched from Lebanon, and perhaps also from Iran, to the north. I think I saw that same number in a WhatsApp message around 11:00 this morning, though I'm not sure. Either way, that's a lot of missiles. It comes to one about every ten minutes. Even if these 150 missiles get spread out over the entire range of the north, clearly when residents of the north say that they don't have a life, they're not exaggerating.
And now I guess we're back to our normal abnormal. I'm after my shower, happily, and even a bit to my surprise, without any out of the ordinary news to report, though that doesn't mean that in the north things have been quiet, only that apparently no one was injured, only damage to property. In the general Tel Aviv vicinity the early evening barrage also only caused property damage, and it seems that we no longer get excited about that. And that being the case, I can send this and go to sleep.
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