Israeli rescuers search through the rubble at the site of an overnight Iranian missile strike in Bat Yam, near Tel Aviv, on June 15. Photo by Gil Cohen-Magen / AFP / Getty Images
Columnist
Dan Perry
June 15, 2025
TEL AVIV, Israel — It’s 3 a.m. Sirens are wailing, and the Home Front app, which sends safety alerts out across Israel, is shrieking. We live on the sixth floor of an apartment building. Taking the elevator during a missile strike is ill-advised. Bleary-eyed neighbors are clogging the stairwell. Some are calm. Others, less so. It’s narrow, dim, chaotic.
A woman in her late 70s, who is visiting her daughter, an immigrant to Israel, from France, tumbles headfirst down an unlit section of the stairs. She doesn’t speak Hebrew or English. People try to help. I try to help. No one can do much. She’ll be ok, but for now, she sits, dazed, and the stairwell is blocked.
My wife is already waiting in the underground basement shelter at the bottom of the stairs. She left our apartment before me; she takes the Home Front alerts, which have been blaring every few hours since Iran first retaliated against Israel’s complex Friday strikes on its military and nuclear facilities, as seriously as humanly possible. I’m somewhat more laid back. But when I don’t show up fast enough, and the lack of cell reception in the shelter means her nervous texts don’t go through, she dispatches our daughter, home from college in the U.S. for what was supposed to be a relaxing visit, to check on me. It’s my daughter’s birthday.
I meet her with a shrug and some frantic hand signals. I’m not late on purpose, I try to say. An old woman fell on the stairs, and I’m letting her go first. Surely even in wartime that buys some grace.
Down in the shelter, my wife is passing around a birthday cake. We weren’t supposed to be celebrating in a bomb shelter, but she made the cake before Iran’s attack started taking out buildings across the country. Neighbors smile politely. One man pats his belly to decline — no explanation needed. A little girl accepts a paper plate, followed by others, and also two adults who pretend to be interested.
“Chocolate?” one asks. “Dark chocolate,” my wife replies.
Someone brought down water and soft drinks. My daughter brought a backgammon set; we might be here a while. People try to get comfortable in plastic chairs set up against the wall.
“If I bring whiskey next time, will you drink with me?” one of our livelier neighbors asks me. She’s always flanked by her enormous Great Danes. I’m usually wary of large dogs, but these two are docile. One insists on getting chin rubs from my daughter. My wife looks on disapprovingly — she doesn’t much like dogs.
“Wine is better,” I offer. “Upsets my wife less.”
Suddenly, a deafening explosion that sounds like it happened right overhead. “Are we hit?” asked one woman. “That kind of explosion means an interception,” answers one middle-aged man. “The issue now is falling debris, since with these Iranian rockets that’s a missile in itself.”
An elderly couple bickers. The man, Shabtai, is fumbling with a transistor radio. “That’s not the right channel!” his wife snaps, making urgent hand motions.
The right channel would be Israeli public radio, which has a running news program providing the specific location alerts for strikes, as well as commentary and interviews. I spring into action — my second act of minor heroism for the day. “95.5 FM,” I say, and tune the radio for him.
Shabtai seems equal parts grateful and annoyed. At least his wife is mollified.
Then the radio announces that an Iranian salvo actually landed in metro Tel Aviv — they won’t say exactly where. No one is laughing now.
Israel is a nation in trauma. The unraveling began in earnest days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government took power at the end of 2022. On Jan. 4, 2023, Justice Minister Yariv Levin unveiled a judicial “reform” plan that would have neutered the courts and cemented authoritarian rule. The country erupted. Nine months of paralyzing protest followed.
Division seeped into every crack of society. Defense officials warned Netanyahu that this kind of internal fracture invited attack. He ignored them.
Then came Oct. 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas terrorists stormed into southern Israel, killing almost 1,200 people and kidnapping another 250 to Gaza. In the north, Hezbollah began a relentless bombardment. More than 50,000 Israelis evacuated their homes. Soon, as Israel commenced war against Hamas, the Houthis of Yemen joined the fray, with missiles, drones and attacks on merchant ships. Many nights since, the sirens have screamed.
And as they have, we’ve all learned the accompanying routines: shelter, wait, check the news. We’ve watched the IDF casualty numbers tick upward. We’ve seen hostages die — some by enemy hands, some, tragically, by friendly fire. Many people are horrified by the Palestinian death toll; too many are not.
Many believe this war is being prolonged by politics. That Netanyahu can’t end it without losing his far-right coalition. That keeping the conflict alive is keeping him in power.
The hatred bred by these years of unrelenting strife, partly imposed by internal politics, is corrosive. Former Chief Justice Aharon Barak and others have warned of civil war. Even before Israel attacked Iran last week, these warnings didn’t feel like exaggerations.
And now we are back to sheltering — back to accruing more trauma, which will affect our future in ways I fear might be profoundly damaging. Iran’s missiles have payloads far beyond anything we’ve faced. Entire buildings have been obliterated. The sirens, which in previous conflicts have often been primarily a signal that the Iron Dome is at work, mean something different now: If you’re not in a reinforced shelter, you might not make it.
Still, there are memes going around about Israeli dads ignoring the sirens, or moving at a glacial pace, while the womenfolk bolt to safety. A sexist trope? Maybe. But it checks out, at least in my household.
In the shelter, our third-floor neighbor calls me over. She and her visiting boyfriend have politics on their mind. They hate Netanyahu, like most people in this north Tel Aviv neighborhood. They know I write columns, and appear sometimes on TV. They know I’ve met the man.
“What do you think?” she asks. The boyfriend hesitates, then admits: “I actually support him in this case. I think we had no choice — with the ayatollahs getting nukes.”
The radio spits out a list of missile targets: one is very close to us. This doesn’t feel like the moment to spread more doubt. “I don’t rule out that you’re right,” I say.
“It’s hard to believe,” the neighbor sighs. Then she asks me to help assemble a portable fan.
Eventually, the all clear sounds. Some youngish men help the French old lady to her feet. She insists she’s okay. Shabtai swings open the heavy shelter door; stooped with age, perhaps — but he’s still the building’s organizer of things.
“See you all in a couple of hours!” says the neighbor with the dogs. Everyone laughs this time. But it is a laughter that has no connection to humor at all.
