After 18 months reporting on the war in Ukraine, Kiwi photojournalist Tom Mutch has arrived in Tel Aviv where he says the terror and shock is still very fresh.
“If you see a rocket outside, yell in panic at the top of your lungs, so the whole plane knows!”, said Alon Miele, the young Israeli in the seat behind me said. The flight attendant on our flight from Cyprus to Tel Aviv told me to raise my window cover, in preparation for landing. But in war, even when people are scared out of their wits, they usually keep their sense of humour.
There were perhaps 20 people on a plane that could hold 200, and I was told I was the only non-Israeli. People were tense and nervous, with clasped hands and furrowed brows. Ben Gurion Airport, our destination, had come under rocket fire several times over the last week. Miele, a 26-year-old from the Israeli city of Herzliya told me that the day before the war began, he and his friends had left to take a vacation in the Netherlands. “But no one can enjoy a holiday like this, we were all worried about our families, our friends.”
See also: Experts say Hamas and Israel are both committing war crimes in their fight
When I land, it isn’t long before I hear the familiar whine of an air raid siren and a loud series of booms above my head. Hamas says it has fired more than 5000 rockets at Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa and other cities throughout the country. But Israel’s air defence system, known as the Iron Dome, intercepts and destroys the vast majority of them. Occasionally they do get through, however, and one landed in central Tel Aviv on the first day of the war.
It’s been two weeks since Hamas, a militant organisation that controls the Gaza Strip, launched a terror attack throughout Israel that killed more than 1400 people, in the biggest mass killing of Jews in the 21st century. Civilians were murdered at Kibbutzes and at a music festival in an extraordinarily well-planned and ruthlessly executed assault that was months in the planning. Around 200 hostages were taken to the Gaza Strip, where they are being held as bargaining chips.
In response, Israel has launched a counterattack against Gaza targeting Hamas, which has killed thousands more. It is the worst escalation of violence between Israel and the Palestinians in decades, with scenes of murder and chaos that have shocked the world. The children here look scared and, when they hide in the bomb shelter or the staircase in an air raid siren, they shiver in fear.
Tel Aviv’s usually bustling streets are now nearly empty, especially after 8pm. when the rockets start flying. It is almost strange seeing people shocked and running to an air-raid shelter at the sounds of an air-raid siren. In Ukraine, where I’ve been reporting for the past 18 months, no one bats an eyelid when the alarm sounds and most people keep walking down the street and going about their day. Shops, restaurants and bars have remained open throughout Ukraine since a few weeks into the war, whereas much of Israel feels like a ghost town.
In Israel, the terror and shock is still very fresh. There has been a major change in Israeli opinion on the stakes of the conflict. Some who previously ignored it or thought of it as a territorial dispute now see it as an existential struggle. “The world must know that their [Hamas’s] goal is to destroy the State of Israel out of an abysmal hatred for the Jewish people,” Noam Shenhav, an Israeli actress living in Tel Aviv, told me. “The world must know that Hamas is worse than Isis … for Israel to be safe and for people to be able to sleep here in peace, we must protect ourselves as is the case in every country in the world! No country would agree to have missiles launched at it systematically ... let children be murdered in front of their parents!”
One woman, whose mother and brother were kidnapped by Hamas at the Nirim Kibbutz and taken to Gaza, agrees, saying: “A lot of my friends who lived and will live again in Nirim were liberals on the left. We weren’t aware of what they were capable of, but we woke up in the most brutal and terrible way.”
“To be a Jew is to live in fear at all times”, Sharon, an Israeli woman from Tel Aviv told me. “I come from a left perspective, I want the occupation to end, and to live in peace. But everything changed on October 7. We saw a barbarism and horror we’d never seen before. You cannot expect people to live with the fear of something like that happening to them again.”
“I’m used to living under wars, we’ve been through several of them since I’ve been here,” said Shay, a yoga instructor living in Tel Aviv. She had been called in by a local hostel, which was sheltering families that had moved from southern areas near the front line, to teach a yoga class for children and young people who had been displaced by the violence. “But this time feels much different. It feels like this is a war defined by its cruelty, on both sides.”
There are no yoga classes in Gaza. Instead, in the narrow strip, where two million people are crammed into one of the world’s most densely populated areas, Israel has unleashed what many Israelis describe unironically as the “wrath of god”. More artillery and air power has been used on Gaza in the past 10 days than in all the previous conflicts here combined. The human toll has been terrible. According to Gazan officials, at least 3000 people have been killed in strikes throughout the strip. Israel has mobilised more than 300,000 reservists for a possible ground invasion of Gaza, which would see brutal urban fighting such as that against Isis in Syria or Iraq.
The level of destruction has caused Palestinians to also see this conflict in existential terms. Muhanned Qafesha, a Palestinian living in Hebron in the occupied West Bank, says that Palestinians see “Israel’s actions in Gaza are genocidal now. What they are trying to do is a second Nakba”, referring to the events of 1948 when 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes after an Israeli military victory.
Israel has demanded that more than a million Palestinians move from the dense urban terrain around Gaza City in the north, to move south to avoid the fighting. Many are worried that this temporary exodus will end up being permanent, with their city too destroyed to return to.
“What I think is happening here is not self-defence that Israel is doing … when Israel talks about ethnically cleansing Palestinians on media, that shows us the plan that Israel has for us,” Qafesha told me.
“They talk about sending Palestinians in Gaza to Sinai … that is the plan of the Israeli operation on Gaza. The plan is to annex the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to Israel, kick millions of Palestinians out of Palestine, and turn it into a Jewish-only state. People have to realise that supporting Palestinian rights is not about supporting Hamas, it is about supporting humanity.”
For all the surface similarities of explosions, air alarms and soldiers in the streets, this war feels distinctly different to the one in Ukraine. One thing that struck me about Ukraine’s war was the sense of optimism, that the country had stood up against a much larger and stronger aggressor. President Volodymyr Zelensky gained a sky-high popularity rating and remains a national and international hero.
Here, much of this is reversed. Israel has an overwhelming advantage in military technology and firepower, but it has severely shaken the country’s faith in many of its vaunted institutions. “This government won’t survive a moment after the war,” Sharon tells me.
The enormous intelligence failure that allowed an attack like October 7 to go ahead, with a level of success that surprised even its planners, has severely damaged the reputation of the country’s intelligence agencies and military. In some ways, this war has united the country against a common foe, but four out of five Israelis in polls blame Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for failing to prevent the attack.
Raphael Jerusalmy, a retired colonel in the Israeli Defence Forces and former adviser to the government, told me that what Israel feared the most was a wider regional conflagration that dragged in outside powers, particularly the Hezbollah militia based in Lebanon. He explained that they had a rocket arsenal of more than 200,000, as well as thousands of battle-hardened fighters who had gained experience in urban warfare during the civil war in Syria.
After a few days in Tel Aviv, I moved to Jerusalem to prepare for a longer trip around the country and into the occupied Palestinian territories. But it has been a grim start, as people seem to have given up hope that peace could ever be found in the region talking in apocalyptic terms. Waiting for my colleagues at the train station, two young Israeli men, a couple, approached me, asking if I was a journalist from Ukraine. They’d spied my flak jacket with a Ukraine flag patch. Uriel Zimerman, as one of them introduced himself, sat with me and we talked for around an hour about the crisis, and the way forward.
“I was working in city hall in charge of making lists of missing and dead people … taking 30 calls a day saying ‘my son is lost … I can’t find my husband. People outside Israel are trying to understand what people in this war are doing rationally. Our reactions now are not rational, they are emotional. I’m proud to be Israeli and I’m proud to be Jewish. But I’m not proud of what our government or our nation has become … what’s happening now is the peak of a longer story. When there aren’t rockets fired from Gaza to Israel, there are stabbings [of Jews] in the streets and people getting run over. When there aren’t Israeli air forces showering bombs onto houses, there are arrests (of Palestinians) every night in Ramallah and Nablus. When you are talking to an Israeli on a day to day, you have to understand the militant patriotism and nationalism.”
As I waited around for my ride, I asked him to teach me a few words of Hebrew. His answer was one of the few rays of hope I’d heard since my arrival. “You will hear a lot of bad words and a lot of hard words doing journalism here. So I will teach you some better words. ‘Aahava’ is ‘love’. ‘Tikvah’, ‘hope’ … and ‘hhai’ means ‘life’. These are the words I want you to know.”
Check the numbers from tonight's draw to see if you are a winner.