by Xinhua writer Pang Xinyi
JERUSALEM, April 28 (Xinhua) -- The broken glass in Raanan Peltz's office had not yet been swept up. He waved me in anyway. With every step, shards crunched underfoot.
"Do you think the war will end soon?" I asked.
He pondered the question for a while but said nothing.
It was a silence I had encountered often in Israel: at the edge of rubble in Tel Aviv, in the basement of a shelter in Arad, and among almond blossoms near the Lebanese border. Everyone, in one way or another, has felt the cost of war. Yet the conflicts went on, spawning new conflicts as if war itself had learned how to breed. Almost no one remained optimistic that the ordeal would ever end, or could clearly say what, in the end, it was all for.
It was Feb. 28, a Saturday, Israel's Sabbath, and the country was still half-asleep when a siren cut through the morning. Phones lit up with emergency alerts from the Home Front Command: In light of the security situation, please immediately identify the shelter nearest to you.
For many Israelis, that was how this latest chapter of war began: not with a speech or an explosion, but with a siren and a push notification. Minutes later, Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that Israel had launched what he called a "preemptive" strike on Iran.
My colleagues and I drove at once to Tel Aviv, a city already living on wartime nerves since October 2023. Two hours later, Iran's first wave of drones and missiles arrived. Sirens wailed. Residents poured into shelters. Helicopters crossed overhead, and the crack of interceptors split the air.
After nightfall, I watched the first missile strike the city. At about 10:45 p.m., the sirens sounded again. Interceptors leapt up from the horizon, chasing a faint light above the clouds. But the light did not disappear. It slipped past them, accelerated downward, and then, all of a sudden, there was fire. The blast was deafening. Windows shook. Tel Aviv had been hit.
At the impact site, a three-story building had partially collapsed. A crater 10 meters wide yawned in the road. More than a dozen cars had been caught in the blast, some burned to bare frames. The air smelled of scorched metal and concrete.
"Suddenly there was a tremendous explosion," said Shauli Licht, 22, who once served in the military. "On the battlefield, you get used to the sounds. But when it happens this close, when it reaches the people you love, it is always terrifying." He looked over the chaos, then said quietly: "I wish the war would end."
As the weeks passed, the fire spread deeper into the country. Three weeks in, missiles struck Arad and nearby Dimona. Apartment blocks had lost entire walls, leaving only skeletal frames. Office buildings stood gutted, among them Peltz's, less than 30 meters from the blast site.
"We are not safe anywhere," a young local who gave his name as Achan told me. "As long as you are in Israel, you are in a war zone. You can be hurt anywhere."
In mid-March, my colleagues and I headed north toward Kiryat Shmona, near the Lebanese border, where exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah had turned the area into a tense front line. The landscape was breathtaking. But the closer we came, the heavier the air seemed to grow.
Near the border, I looked across at Lebanese villages reduced to rubble. On the Israeli side, villages stood almost empty. Tanks were assembling in the valley below. Fighter jets and attack helicopters swept overhead. On our trip to Metula, the northernmost town in Israel, every phone inside our car suddenly screamed at once.
We flung open the doors and hit the ground. The siren tore across the valley. Ten seconds later came the blast. More explosions followed, closer this time, rolling toward us in waves. What I remember most clearly is the silence between them -- the terrible pause broken only by heavy breathing.
Though frightened, we survived unscathed. But others were not as lucky. In the communities we had just passed, a missile had torn through one family's courtyard. A car had burned to its frame. Somewhere along that route, a 17-year-old girl, fleeing a rocket alert, was killed by a passing vehicle.
In Israel, as in other countries cast into the shadows of war, ordinary people are carrying the weight of conflict.
On March 28, one month after the war with Iran began, a human chain gathered in Habima Square in central Tel Aviv. Demonstrators raised signs and chanted anti-war slogans. "Enough! End this endless war!" read one placard.
Yael, an upset woman who declined to give her full name, stood among them. "In Iran, in Palestine, in Israel, in Lebanon, these children died in war and violence," she said. "We say clearly: children are victims of war. We demand an end to the war, an end to the killing."
But her wish did not seem any closer to fulfillment that night. In Gaza, people were still dying under intermittent Israeli strikes. On television, generals and politicians continued to threaten new military action against Lebanon and Iran. The specter of war still hung over the land.
Then the police moved in. Protesters were shoved to the ground, and some were detained. Officers said the gathering violated emergency rules banning public assembly. My phone buzzed: the Israeli military had just announced new strikes on Lebanon.
Now, on April 28, Israel's threat to renew strikes on Iran still hangs in the air. On the Lebanese front, the campaign has never truly ceased, truce notwithstanding.
Lately, I have often found myself returning to Peltz's silence and understanding it more fully. Back in Arad, he told me he had no plans to fully repair his office, even though the Iranian attacks had, for now, eased under a ceasefire.
"The war isn't over," he said. "You never know when the next missile might come." Enditem
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