Sleepless and defiant: on the ground in Tel Aviv
Once upon a time it would have been unthinkable to talk about cratered buildings and rising death tolls in Tel Aviv. How are locals adjusting to this new reality? | WATCH
It may not be desirable, or comfortable, but right now it’s just more practical to sleep fully-clothed in Tel Aviv.
Those who risk the alternative, as the naked sleepers might, are liable for some very awkward minutes with their neighbours in the midnight scramble for a bomb shelter.
Call it one of many very small adjustments being made to daily living here.
Another is accepting that the days of a good night’s sleep are bygone luxury, before the nightly routine of alarms and sirens. But this, too, shall pass, is what the people keep saying.
What’s likely to remain, however, is the shattered belief in Israel’s impenetrable security, the myth of Israel as the ultimate safe room for its people – busted first on October 7 with catastrophic failures at the border with Gaza, and now against Iran, exposing painful limitations with the country’s valiant, but hardly omniscient, defence of the skies.
Once upon a time it would have been unthinkable to talk about cratered buildings and rising death tolls in cities such as Tel Aviv or Haifa.
Yet on Friday, in the working-class region of Bat Yam, an entire city block was pummelled by a rogue missile that managed to bypass multiple layers of sophisticated air defences. Recovery crews, still pulling bodies from the wreckage, have counted nine people dead and another 200 injured.
Taking us on a tour of his ruined home, Narkis Safonov, who has lived in Bat Yam for 53 years, brushed off the thought of taking up government accommodation.
Glass crunching underfoot, he showed off a clean mattress where he sleeps, in a room battered by a blast wave that peeled off roofs and blew out every window for a kilometre.
Asked how the attack made him feel about the war with Iran, Safonov expressed exhaustion.
“You know, it’s a lot of war. Iran, Yemen and Gaza. We’re fed up,” he said, chuckling to himself.
“We haven’t got any chance to breathe.”
Atop a high-rise residential apartment not far away, its roof accessible by ladder, men from Jerusalem climbed to the top for a view of the wreckage below, posing for selfies against the skyline and a city vista of satellites and hot-water units.
They had travelled more than an hour to see what the whole country had been talking about. “How often does something like this happen?” asked one of the men, who declined to be named, when questioned on why he had bothered.
At a cafe down the street, local man Eitan, aged 79, said the arrival of missile fire to his beloved town only hardened his resolve for peace.
“The biggest disappointment of my life is that we don’t live in peace with Arabs,” he said.
“I hope for peace, just deep peace. Make some agreement, any agreement, make peace. Shame that people are killed, people are wounded.”
At the request of the army, media outlets don’t publicise the exact locations of the Iranian missile strikes, namely for reasons of security. “The enemy monitors such footage to improve its targeting,” said Brigadier General Effie Defrin, in remarks made on Friday, a lifetime ago in a war of increasing daily velocity.
Overnight, another 40 missiles were launched from Iran at Haifa, in Israel’s north, and at suburbs around Tel Aviv in the centre of the country, the explosions killing at least five people and injuring more than 80 others, numbers sure to rise as the recovery continues.
A hotel clerk, explaining security options in the event of an emergency, said we could always shun the traditional choices of the stairwell, or basement, to watch the “light show” from the balcony instead.
“Black humour,” he shrugged, as we looked at him askance, “without it you can’t survive here.”
If anything remains of Israel’s famed, mythologised impenetrability, then it’s likely to be found in the battle-tested resilience of its unflappable population. Many, such as Mr Safonov, are tired of the fighting: in Gaza and Lebanon, with the proxy militias in Syria and Iraq, with the Houthis in Yemen and the West Bank terror cells. Not everyone has the stomach for another war.
And then you meet Sigalit Navarro, whose apartment was destroyed by the blast in Bat Yam, and who spoke with pride of her mission to continue living in exactly the same neighbourhood, regardless of the terror inflicted.
“No one will break us, no one,” she said. “We are heroes. We’re so used to all this mess, all this bomb, so it makes you strong. No matter what.”
Sleepless for now, and perhaps more irritable, but the sky, for many, is yet to fall.
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