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This evening in Israel is the start of the last day of Pesach. Ordinarily there would be a Shabbat-type dinner in the chadar ochel, but after more than five weeks of our war we're still not congregating in groups larger than fifty. So while I was in the archives this morning (Tuesday is our regular meeting day) Tzippi baked a cake, and then later in the afternoon we were both busy with numerous other cooking chores. Eitan, BTW, joined us for dinner. At about 18:00, just after we put the antipasti in the oven, we had a preliminary alert. A couple of minutes later the siren sounded. So we took the antipasti out and went to our safe room. The all clear came in about ten minutes, and we returned to our cooking/preparing.
That was our only alert today (so far, of course), but for much of Israel it hasn't been a quiet day. Numerous missiles were sent from Iran during the day, and some of them ended with damage to property and slight injuries. We're not really surprised that there have been more missiles today - Trump's ultimatum ends at 03:00 this morning, and the assumption has been that Iran will ramp up its barrages until then. For his part Trump can't stop his hyperbole. He wrote: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will." That's outright and blatantly criminal. We usually say that he should be hospitalized, but in this case jail makes more sense. Sadly, that's not going to happen. When I first saw this quote about five hours ago I wrote to the WhatsApp group of (former) Meretz members in the kibbutz movement asking if we can make some sort of statement that this is criminal. A bit to my surprise, there's been no response at all, though I should add that the group has been very quiet of late.
As I write this we're getting a report that some sort of stepping back from the brink is being worked out. I don't know the details, but it seems as though the deadline is going to be moved forward again. As we've been told numerous times, this is a war that was totally won and finished weeks ago already. Yet here we are again, on the verge of all hell breaking loose, while at the same time we're told that some sort of temporary ceasefire is in the making. Be that as it may, a few moments ago, on the news channel we clicked into, a representative of the home front command didn't exactly recommend that people sleep in their safe rooms tonight, but he did say that it's definitely not a bad idea.
On Shabbat and holidays we shower before dinner, so I don't need to now. I'll simply send this, hoping that we'll sleep through the night.
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