It’s hard to imagine how people in Sydney, or Melbourne, or any other state capital would react to news of an incoming rocket barrage. Maybe they’d all go out and buy a bunch of toilet paper.

We do know how the typical Israeli behaves, conditioned as they’ve become to the feints and thrusts of their less-receptive neighbours. Let’s put it this way: if not giving a crap were an Olympic sport, the Tel Avivian would have achieved icon status years ago.

The first inklings of this latest Iranian drama began to spread around 4pm on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST) when the unofficial whisper network of well-placed sources in this country, always emerging with startling efficiency during a crisis, began letting people know there was trouble afoot.

“Sleep in Ra’anana tonight,” one person wrote cryptically on WhatsApp, referring to a clean but very dull Israeli city, and notionally one of the safest, located about 30 minutes outside of Tel Aviv in the centre of the country.

A striking feature of impending doom in Israel – on this occasion and many others – is that even when the news is confirmed by the newspapers, or the government, the behaviour of the people hardly changes at all.

Bare-shouldered women leaned back into their seats at the outdoor cafes. Fellas slouched around at bus stops and kept walking their ugly mixed-breed dogs. Old guys with large bellies didn’t budge from their plastic chairs, didn’t break the momentum of their world-solving arguments.

Truly, there wasn’t the slightest signal of urgency to be found anywhere.

Not until nightfall, around 7pm, when suddenly the emergency alerts began their own obscene bombardment. These warnings blasted through car stereos and stopped traffic on the Ayalon Highway, where journalist Liam Mendes and I were driving. We were en route to the scene of a terrorist attack when every smartphone in the country suffered a grand mal seizure from the simultaneous alerts telling people to run for shelter.

Out of the car and on to the road, the standard procedure is to lie on your guts and cover your head or, for the curious, to look up to see what they told you to expect, and what has reduced this noisy, sweaty puddle of a city to a state of the pure, unsettling quietude. Even when the rockets are overhead and plainly visible, they don’t make a sound.

You’re watching a silent movie in the sky; a sickening swarm that travelled a long way to harm you is being met by the Israeli-made defence system called Iron Dome. The system picks off whatever it can, but missiles slip through its defences; when that happens the only thing to do is to involuntarily lose all breath, or utter an expletive, and watch in fright as the rocket travels at velocity towards whatever lies in its path.

Just as the skies began to clear and people permitted themselves a shallow sigh of relief, another round of alerts infiltrated the notification screens on everyone’s phone. Back on to the floor, with missiles colliding overhead. The whole ordeal lasted 25 minutes before everyone returned to their cars and traffic finally started moving again.

Somewhat surreally, the first wave of missiles arrived just as first responders were attending that active shooter incident in the Tel Aviv precinct of Jaffa, where gunmen had opened fire at a light rail stop and killed at least six people, injuring nine others.

You’d think that when rockets land amid an unfolding terrorist attack that the people would call it a day and go home for the night.

Not here, apparently. At a convenience store near Jaffa, witnesses moseyed in to buy snacks and supplies after emerging from their shelters and safe rooms.

“I got a call from my mum crying, saying my location was at a shooting location, so we ran home on a scooter,” said Jared Akka, an 18-year-old visiting from the US. “It was terrifying, a scary experience to say the least.”

Mr Akka said Los Angeles would shut itself down if this had happened there but it’s “completely different here. I feel like people are used to it here.”

Notable, too, is that the Iranian attack was timed for the eve of Jewish New Year, which in Israel carries about the same significance as Christmas in Australia; it’s a holiday that combines food and family and the custom of dipping apples into honey, then wishing each other a sweet new year. What an ironic sentiment at a time like this.

The world now waits for what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might order in response to the Iranian posturing. Army chief of staff Herzi Halevi held briefings all night, including with US CENTCOM General Michael Kurilla. Only now do we know that some of the missiles were intercepted before arriving in Israel through a “defensive coalition” led by the Americans, the IDF said.

And this all went down as the Israeli air force scrambled its jets south for an airstrike on a Hamas cell embedded in a Gazan school, where fighting continues, and while IDF troops pushed further forward over the northern border into Lebanon to dismantle Hezbollah infrastructure. And while the Houthis in Yemen are still firing rockets at Israel, and Iranian-backed militia groups in Iraq and Syria are doing the same.