Blaring Sirens, Numbing Silence

When the sirens go off, no matter how calm and rational one tries to be, there is a definite shift in energy in the body. A first-person account

- Kusumita Das

WHEN you wake up to air raid sirens, you don’t immediately realise they are, in fact, air raid sirens, especially when you are half in your sleep, more irritated than alarmed, by the alarms. And also not when you’re living in Jerusalem where such sirens are unusual even during terror attacks. What’s usual, in fact, are random alarms going off in downtown neighbourhoods like mine, shattering the quietness of Shabbat weekend mornings. All one is left to do is mutter a curse and try to go back to sleep, or simply grow immune towards the intrusion.

This time though something rang ominous, and even as we tried to fight our drowsiness, in a few seconds we knew that these were Hamas rocket alerts. With barely any time to process this, we ran out of the door of our apartment and took shelter in the stairs, as the sirens grew louder and covered the air like a sinister cloak. We waited and waited to hear the boom of the Iron Dome interception—there were probably ten as far as I recall.

News started trickling in soon, and in a matter of seconds, our phone screens filled up with headlines of horror, as we made our way back inside our flat. Hamas had infiltrated the southern border towns of Israel and had launched a brutal attack of proportions no one saw coming. Branding this attack as Operation Al Aqsa Flood, named after the mosque in Jerusalem, revered as the third-holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina, Hamas militants had captured at least one military base, several kibbutzes and entire neighbourhoods in Southern Israel, open firing at a desert music festival, taking close to a thousand people hostage in their homes, kidnapping some of them to Gaza, while murdering and butchering others.