I just wanted to check in and say that thankfully we are OK and thank you to everyone who PMed me to see how we are doing.

We've been running in and out of shelters since the air raid sirens went Saturday morning, just as we were about to leave for Sabbath morning services at our local synagogue.

Friday night prayers welcoming Shabbat this evening will be just a few neighbours gathering in someone's home shelter so that no one has to walk far from home and be caught out in the open if a siren sounds.

Grateful that our semi-basement level apartment has a home shelter, many people have to run to shared public ones or take cover in deep underground rail stations and parking garages.

I'm also grateful that my main "complaint" is that I am by now so under-slept from disturbed nights that I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing, constantly waiting for that grating alert to scream from my phone warning of another incoming round of ballistic missiles from Iran, time to rush back into our postage stamp sized shelter, shut the blast door and hope nobody needs bathroom.

The potential of this situation has been hanging over us for so long, I think that by the time it happened the whole country was one tightly wound spring from the tension of whether it would and when. Weeks of saying "we'll do x or y, well, unless war breaks out again", restocking our emergency supplies just in case.

This time of year is popular for weddings, we have several friends who's children were supposed to be tying the knot over the last week or next, but with strict emergency rules in place against too many people gathering together (in case of a direct hit) other than inside a bomb shelter, wedding halls are closed. So a few days ago my friend's daughter got married in her neighbours' back garden, close to a home with a big enough shelter, with just her immediate family. Another friend's daughter is due to get married on a kibbutz in central Israel this Sunday, she'll also be having a much smaller family ceremony in someone's yard close to shelter.

So in a bizarre way it's like we're back to Covid lockdown, schools and businesses closed except for essential services, everyone who can do so advised to work from home, school children going over to remote learning.

Most missiles and drones are successfully intercepted, and while that is better than a massive ballistic missile with something like a 500kg warhead crashing into a residential area, it still means that there are instead multiple pieces of smaller shrapnel falling to earth and these can still do plenty of damage. Some of the missiles have cluster warheads which spread multiple little bomblets all over the place.

We don't know what will be, how long and what will be the outcome. Everything is up in the air again and we are doing our best to roll with the punches and keep our family safe.