Good morning, everybody. Until Sunday, I was in Jerusalem. And I intend to return there on Thursday if Iran’s missiles will permit El Al to continue running its flights. Although I spend a great deal of time in London, my home is now in Jerusalem. So let me start by giving you a little snapshot of what it’s been like in Jerusalem in the last three weeks when the air raid siren goes.
We have 90 seconds to get into a shelter. And for me, that’s a choice. I have this dialog in my head the whole time. Is it safer for me to go down to the underground car parking lot where there are two shelters equipped with lavatories for a long stay? Or is it safer for me to stay in my stairwell? Because it will take me quite a long time to get to the shelter. And I have concluded that I am safer in the stairwell. I’m looking at the guidance that the Israeli government authorities offer to all of us.
Make sure you have in your house or in your shelter enough water for at least three days per person. Make sure you have enough dried goods have with you a battery operated radio. Make sure you have with you a flashlight. Be prepared for a very long stay in the shelter. So I stay in my stairwell and I wonder whether I’m ever going to see my cupboard with my dried goods and my water. In the street, I meet people.
A friend who has five sons underground. Five sons and a son in law on the front lines somewhere. He has no idea where, in the south or in the north. I meet another friend, an elderly man who says in tears: thank goodness, one of my grandchildren, one of my grandsons, was wounded and he’s now home. But the other grandson is on the front line. I don’t know where. Another friend says to me as she burst into tears in the street. She says that her granddaughter was about to be married on the Tuesday after the terrible attack on Simha Torah and the wedding was postponed.
The boyfriend, the husband to be, as soon as the sirens went off on that terrible day, he rushed down south. He knew that friends of his were in one of the kibbutzim on that border. He got his gun. He rushed down south and he met there at the kibbutz, a scene of indescribable carnage. And he also met Hamas terrorists roaming around, still murdering people.
He killed a very large number of terrorists that day, until he himself was himself was wounded and apparently he collapsed. He was simply exhausted and he was shot. He collapsed into a ditch somewhere and the IDF eventually found him. They thought he was a terrorist and they prepared to shoot him.
And then someone said he’s wearing Tzitzit and he was not shot. He was rescued and put into immediate counseling, Immediate counseling because of the trauma of what he had seen.
Israel is a very small country, as you know. There is virtually not a family that’s not touched by this in some way. They have a relative who’s been murdered, who’s been kidnaped, who’s vanished. Their children, their grandchildren, their nephews, their nieces are being called up to the front line. My husband’s cousin, a man he’d actually never seen, another story, was murdered at the music festival.
He went there with his wife. His wife started to run, like in the scenes that we’ve all seen. The man himself had been wounded in a previous war in Israel. He couldn’t run. He was murdered. I have a young cousin who is somewhere probably in Gaza, having been called up. People are going in Israel to funeral after funeral after funeral.
The population is traumatized, shocked and grieving. It is shocked. Above all, at the collapse of the assumption that Israel is where we are actually safe. We have an army now. Never again. Isn’t that the slogan on which the country is based? Well, it happened again in Israel. We’ve seen barbarism and depravity on a scale not seen since the Shoah.
Anxiety levels are off the scale. Children and relatives are at risk. The rockets keep coming. The red alert on my phone lights up with rocket attacks all the time. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis are displaced and are living now in hotels. Missiles were fired from Yemen, and shot down by the Americans in recent days. Those missiles were aimed at Eilat, the holiday venue on the sea, where thousands of Jews, of Israelis evacuated from the south are now being accommodated in those hotels. Everyone is braced and dreading the opening of that second front in southern Lebanon from which missiles are already being fired; where 130,000 missiles are arranged, pointing at Israel having been situated within civilian life inside and around hospitals, schools, apartment blocks, just as in Gaza. But those missiles in Lebanon operated by the Hezbollah are precise.
They’re accurate. They can cover the entire country. And if they start unleashing, we are in a different ball game. At the same time, I have to tell you, there is such a feeling in Israel now, which is so, so inspiring. It is a feeling of determination and of everyone pulling together in the failings of the leadership in having allowed this thing to happen. It still has to be explained and a reckoning is still to come. But as soon as the attack started, people, young people leapt into their cars and rushed down to defend the border and start killing Hamas. These are all reserves. So many of them are reservists, not all of the reservists.
But there was this coming together from the ground up. They didn’t wait to be told. They didn’t wait to be called up. They just knew that this is the moment we are called upon to defend our country and to defend the Jewish people. And off they went. It was absolutely magnificent. It was heart warming. And it’s not just the people who rushed to engage with the enemy. It is extraordinary how many have rushed to engage with the enemy. There has been, it sounds comical, a 150% response to the call up 150%, because 50% are people who weren’t being called up because they’re too old. The Army didn’t want them, but they got on their planes from every part of the world and poured in. So much, so the army asked, what are we going to do with these people? We haven’t got arms for them. We haven’t got guns, we haven’t got food. Anyway, this was quite comical, but, you know, they were all accommodated. But that’s the sense of solidarity, of unity that has come about in Israel, forging this entirely quarrelsome people once again into a nation, a nation that has risen again from the ground up. And in civil society, everyone is looking out for everyone else. So many people are in grief from the loss of loved ones.
So many people are so anxious. People are looking after each other. Everyone is volunteering. There are hundreds of volunteering outfits, each of which have leapt up. I myself found myself filling pita bread in an assembly line of sandwiches that goes out every day. It’s an extraordinary assembly line. There’s somebody who’s cutting the pita. There’s somebody who’s stuffing the pickles, somebody who’s stuffing the hummus, somebody who is putting it all together, someone who’s shouting to everybody else that they’ve cut it the wrong way. There is somebody who’s loading it all into the trucks. There’s someone who’s loading the trucks, the cars and the young people getting the cars and driving it all around the country for the boys and girls to have that day.
MUCH MORE HERE https://www.frontpagemag.com/melanie-phillips-video-what-the-media-isnt-telling-you-about-israels-war-on-hamas/?