After a sleepless night, Israelis anxiously wonder ‘what happens next?’
Schools were closed on Sunday, and Tel Aviv’s light rail empty as the country awoke to its new reality
Explosions lit up the sky over Jerusalem as missile defense systems worked to intercept an Iranian attack on Israel. Photo by AFPTV/AFP via Getty Images
By Susan Greene April 14, 2024
TEL AVIV – Some bakeries and markets that usually open their doors at 7 a.m. stayed shuttered until 10 or later on Sunday as Israel awoke to its new reality of having been directly attacked by Iran for the first time in history.
Sunday is the start of the Israeli workweek, but schools and many government offices were closed for the day. This cosmopolitan city’s typically crowded light rail was sparse and remarkably silent, with the few passengers glued to their smartphones looking for answers nobody could seem to find.
“What happens next?” I heard one woman asking her husband. “Tonight? Tomorrow? Will we strike back?”
Israel’s war cabinet was set to meet on Sunday afternoon to decide how to respond to the barrage of some 300 drones and missiles launched from Iran overnight, an estimated 99% of which were intercepted, many by forces from the United States or other allies. A 7-year-old girl from a Bedouin community in Israel’s south was hospitalized in critical condition, with a head injury from shrapnel, but otherwise damage was light.
News outlets reported that President Joe Biden and other U.S. officials had advised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to fire back immediately. But Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, said Sunday morning that the confrontation with Iran “is not over yet,” as the unprecedented attacks brought the two nations’ long running clandestine war into the open.
Israeli citizens, weary from more than six months of war in Gaza, were groggy from sleeplessness — or, many told me, sleeping pills — after staying up most the night waiting to see what would happen.
Rocket sirens had blared for hours in dozens of communities, big and small, across the nation. The sky in Jerusalem and several other cities filled with what looked like fireworks as the nation’s air-defense systems intercepted the drones and missiles Tehran fired in retaliation for Israel’s April 1 attack on an Iranian consular building in Syria that killed at least two commanders of its Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Thousands of Israelis spent much of the night in bomb shelters.
Though Tel Aviv was spared most of that, the sound of explosions could be heard in the distance shortly after 1 a.m. Fighter jets and other military aircraft flew over the city throughout the night. Surveillance drones buzzed overhead like the sound of electric razors. GPS apps were jammed, causing Beirut to pop up on the screens of anyone in Tel Aviv looking for directions, and prompting their loved ones tracking their whereabouts from elsewhere in the country or abroad to see, falsely, that they were in Lebanon.
Most people I spoke to as Sunday dawned here said they had slept an hour or two at most. Many watched Channel 12 news all night. Some tossed and turned. Lea Rosenzweig said she sat between the beds of her 3- and 6-year-old boys, praying.
“I felt sick for our country,” she told me when we met on a playground near Tel Aviv’s American Colony neighborhood around 7, careful that her kids could not hear her. “I still feel sick.”
Zev Abramovitz, a tech company manager out walking his shih tzu on Jerusalem Street, said he had felt the Israelis were “like sitting ducks” for the hours between when Iran launched its attacks and the reports that most had been intercepted.
The country had been on edge for nearly two weeks, awaiting Iran’s inevitable response to the Israeli attack in Damascus. But it was still remarkable to watch Tel Aviv’s normally bustling Saturday nightlife shut down with the first reports of Iran launching the drones at about 11 p.m.
The crowds at cafés on Dizengoff Street cleared out. The Arab Israel families celebrating the end of their holiday weekend seemed to suddenly disappear from Jaffa’s gelato and knafeh shops. And the traffic and honking typical of the post-Shabbat hours here vanished, it seemed, within a matter of minutes.
From the streets, I could see lights on and TV screens playing in apartments throughout my neighborhood. And I could see people inside standing at their windows looking out, as if waiting for something to happen.
Most were still on edge 12 hours later, though relieved by the effectiveness of the missile-defense systems. The war with Hamas, devastating as it has been, does not compare in Israeli minds with the existential threat from Iran.
“It’s a bad situation,” Refael Shirkani, who works in his father’s wedding dress fabric shop, told me after a night with only an hour’s sleep. “Everyone suffers, especially the citizens, and it feels like there’s no hope.”
Emma Ramer, who is in elementary school, strolled near Carmel Market this morning in a shirt reading “Good Vibes.” Her mother, Karen, told me that Emma did not know what happened last night — and that she hopes to keep it that way.
Shai Atzmon, 29 and six months pregnant, was the only Tel Avivian I spoke with on Sunday morning who’d had a good night’s rest. She said she feels optimistic despite the prospect of a bigger regional war,
“Actually, I’m very chill about the whole thing,” Atzmon said, rubbing her belly. “This is the situation we’re living in. And we have to look forward.”
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