Nightmare

Content warning: I'm sorry, this is not going to be pleasant reading.

I just want to say thank you for the many many kind and thoughtful people who have reached out to me. In this horrific situation your words mean so much. What we are living through right now is a horror story. I keep starting to post something, then stopping because it's just so terrible, but I wanted to answer all your concerned messages.

We are safe and in an area considered safe.

We are definitely not OK, but we are safe and well considering.

Friday night we went to the festive synagogue services to dance and sing with the Torah scrolls, throw sweets and treats to the community's kids and then enjoyed a family dinner at home.

We woke early Saturday morning to the ominous thud, thud, thud, boom of rockets. We're in the centre of this small country, sound carries far, and we could hear rockets on all sides, volley after volley after volley, thousands of rockets for hours on end fired at towns, villages and major cities in much of the country: Beer Sheva, Jerusalem, the densely populated Tel Aviv area and its many suburbs, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Rehovot, Rishon Letzion...

We decided to go to synagogue for morning services, a short walk away, there is a big shelter there, we hoped to get a better idea of what was happening.

The streets were eerily quiet, the sky was a criss cross of rocket contrails, straight lines for launches from Gaza, loops and swirls for the Iron Dome interception system that hopefully stops them.

A car stopped us in the street, the driver leaned out the window "You know that we're at war?" And we started to learn just how horrific the situation really was.

Life since then is a blur, time has stopped, there are just updates and more updates, and each seems worse than the one before.

The death toll is now more than 1000 Israelis dead, most of them civilians massacred in that initial assault on Israeli rural border villages and towns on Saturday morning, a nightmare killing spree that wiped out entire families, entire communities, babies, children, women, men, young old. Thousands more are wounded, many in serious condition. Thousands more are wounded, many in serious condition.

Among the dead are medics and ambulance crews murdered as they tried to save lives, some ambulances looted and taken as spoils.

The horror is unspeakable.

Women raped, homes set alight and families burnt alive in them, young, old, children and grandparents gunned down in the streets, while trying to hide in their houses, in vehicles trying to escape.

Hamas terrorists went door to door in sleepy small kibbutz villages and towns killing or kidnapping civilians.

A music festival turned in to a killing field.

Young women taken as "trophies" back to Gaza to be paraded in the streets.

Civilians, including children and babies, kidnapped from their homes and taken as hostages to Gaza.

A friend's son was murdered in his kibbutz home. He was an academic, and like many on the kibbutzim, a peace activist. He was murdered trying to protect a neighbour's family with his body as Hamas gunmen fired in to the kibbutz houses, going house to house murdering the residents.

A bartender at a music venue in my area was one of those gunned down at the Nova music festival. A young guy, full of life and optimism, someone I had met a few times, was familiar enough to recognise his smiling face on yet another death notice.

There is almost no one in Israel who hasn't lost someone themselves or knows someone who has. The foodtruck sausage guy we vaguely know lost his friend who borrowed the truck to attend the music festival. The high school on our street has lost a few graduates, students of a friend. A close friend's nephew saw a friend gunned down in cold blood at the music festival but survived by a miracle.

Another friend's son is fighting for his life, critically wounded trying to defend a different kibbutz from the marauders.

A teacher friend's colleague is still missing, fate unknown.

Social media is a constant stream of photos of the missing, family desperate to know if loved ones are alive, dead or kidnapped. Hundreds are still unaccounted for.

There are so many massacre victims that burial teams are still combing the streets, fields, houses, orchards and ditches looking for all the bodies, to ensure that everyone receives a dignified burial. A family friend risked her life driving down to one of the devastated towns to help evacuate people and said that as of yesterday there were still shot up and burnt out vehicles with bodies in them on the streets.

Several friend's children serve with the volunteer Zaka organisation which identifies disaster victims, others are serving with the army chaplaincy. Over the last few days they have spent day and night gathering the bodies for burial, often under fire. 

Another friend's son is an army chaplain, part of a team of chaplains trying to find every last massacre victim and bring them to their families for burial. Like the Zaka volunteers he has been working round the clock, many times under rocket and mortar fire.

There are so many dead that high school kids, 14, 15, 16 year-olds, are digging graves because the burial societies can't cope.

Days later they are still finding more bodies of victims strewn in the fields, roadsides, homes that were boobytrapped by the terrorists so that they had to wait until the army could come and defuse the grenades and bombs before searching more homes for corpses of those massacred.

Communal kibbutz dining halls are acting as makeshift morgues and truck after truck goes out from the Gaza border area taking bodies for burial in safer areas of the country.

We don't know what tomorrow will bring. We haven't had any air raid sirens since Saturday but several times a day and night our windows shake with the boom and thud of distant and not so distant rockets.

Most are intercepted, some have scored direct hits on apartment buildings and homes in other towns and yet more civilians injured.

Our apartment, like most Israeli apartments built since the 1990s, has a reenforced concrete shelter room. It's small though and we have family staying with us, it isn't simple to squeeze nine of us in to that small space.

People are volunteering wherever they can - driving supplies to survivors evacuated from their towns and kibbutzim with nothing but the shirts on their backs, buying and packing care packages, hosting those who have had to flee their homes, donating blood, staffing hospitals overwhelmed with mass casualties, helping families who's fathers, mothers, adult children have received emergency call-ups as army reservists, cooking and baking for families in need. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people have volunteered to deliver supplies around the country and transport evacuees, ordinary civilians just volunteering themselves and their vehicle, including driving in to harm's way to rescue people or deliver much needed humanitarian aid. 

Through all the horror, mourning and devastation Israelis come together and take care of each other, whether it's random people standing by the motorway handing out water to soldiers or entire Druze villages mobilising to provide meals to those evacuated from frontline communities, and opening up their homes to the refugees. 

Israelis know how to unite and offer assistance, support each other, risk their lives for one another. The profound human kindness, human decency we are experiencing from our fellow Israelis is our comfort and our strength.