On Saturday night thousands gathered in Tel Aviv in what has become a weekly ritual of shouting into the night sky outside of Israel’s Defense Ministry, voices hoarse, desperate but defiant, demanding the Netanyahu government secure a hostage release deal. I spotted a woman weaving through the crowd holding a handmade sign that read: “No more war, no more bloodshed.”

But on the ground of course a very different story is playing out. That same night saw back-to-back funerals on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, Israel’s national cemetery. There were so many funerals the last one was held at 3 am. Twenty-four soldiers in all, many of them reservists, were killed in the past week alone. Coverage of their funerals fights for space at the top of news broadcasts with the seeming nonstop barrage of news including the Israeli counter-attack on Iran that began while most Israelis and Iranians were sleeping in the early hours of Saturday night.

Ex-generals and analysts debate what it might herald next as the region continues to live on a knife’s edge a year after Hamas’ October 7 attack.

In northern Gaza meanwhile an Israeli-imposed siege has driven some 60,000 civilians southwards, while airstrikes have left hundreds trapped, both dead and alive under the rubble. These are stories and images most Israelis don’t see both because the television news channels and most news organizations choose not to show them and because even a year after the horrors of October 7 and all the rage and ongoing trauma it understandably wrought, for many Israelis it is still easier to look away.

During my reporting I find myself asking analysts and regular Israelis in interviews – how much longer can this war go on? How much more loss and displacement can Palestinian civilians endure? And for Israelis who have lost loved ones fighting in battle or by a Hezbollah missile raining down on the north, by a drone that crashes through their bedroom wall or ceiling of their military base dining hall or explodes on a soccer field, cut down in a terror attack – how much more suffering are they expected to shoulder? And that’s without mentioning the unimaginable agony of trying to make it through another day while your sister or brother is in a Hamas tunnel deep under Gaza and the everyday dread and fear lived by everyone in this region.

What I hear back from military experts in particular is that in a playbook as old as war, the purpose of military action is to make gains that position your side in as powerful a place as possible from which those in power then pivot to diplomacy. That fighting is a means to an end, not an end to itself. They question openly if the Netanyahu government is being motivated by personal political interest in staying in power over sober security calculations. Netanyahu, Alon Pinkas, Israel’s former consul general in New York, told me, “has sacrificed the hostages, and he’s normalized daily sirens and attacks on Israel.”

Last week there were reports in the Israeli press that army officials were saying that the ground operation in Lebanon focused on uprooting Hezbollah tunnels, lookouts, and other infrastructure would be wrapping up in the coming weeks. I take that as a sign they want to get ahead of any spin that might emerge from the government to resist leaving southern Lebanon any time soon.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, no dove, but considered the voice of moderation in this, the most far-right government in Israel’s history, said Sunday the now weakened Hezbollah and Hamas, the leaders of which Israel assassinated in the past month, are no longer effective arms of Iran’s proxy war against Israel.

"These important achievements create a change in the balance of power... But not every goal can be achieved by military action alone," he said. "Force isn't the be-all and end-all. In fulfilling our moral obligation to bring the hostages home, we will have to make painful compromises."

But painful compromise is not a language this government speaks, especially when a deal for the return of the remaining 101 hostages would mean not only a cease-fire in Gaza, but likely the return of a significant number of Palestinian security prisoners – both of which its extremist flank is vocally opposed to.

Netanyahu appears to be trying to use Israel’s recent tactical successes against Hezbollah and Hamas – and Iran – as a way not to just save face in wake of the most catastrophic security and intelligence failure in the country’s history (and to delay any kind of commission of inquiry into it) but as a way to decisively bludgeon its foes in a bid to reconfigure the entire Middle East. 

But is there any plan for a day after beyond ongoing military aggression – especially when speaking of an eventual Palestinian state is an anathema even among the opposition?

Ariel Levite, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs argues in Haaretz this week, “Deterrence, killing and destruction are at times absolutely necessary. But their benefits, if when real, are necessarily temporary and depend on a nonmilitary leg to complement them. For now, Israeli society is bleeding, riven and scarred, while the fate of the hostages is gnawing away at our social contract.”

On Monday, as the Knesset reconvened for the first time since its summer recess, hostage families again beseeched action, their excruciating pain laid bare. 

In a committee hearing, Yarden Gonen, sister of Romi Gonen, 24, who was taken hostage from the Nova music festival gave voice to the some of her and the country’s darkest fears for women hostages. “If anyone returns with a baby or after giving birth, I will pursue them (decision makers) one by one for the rest of my life because it could have prevented, along with so much else that should not have happened. It’s time to fulfill the values and vision of state of Israel and we cannot say ‘We care about lives, but. There can be no ‘but’ in our values.”

In this seemingly endless war, a friend who lives with her family in a kibbutz in the Galilee described what she described as “a real war in the north."

She spoke of burning hillsides and schools that have been closed since mid-September. In a text she elaborated: “There are constant rockets, missiles and drones … We don’t have sirens every day, but there is so much noise from the artillery fire and the anti-missile and anti-rocket fire that the ground shakes, our windows rattle and you just hope you don’t get caught at the wrong place at the wrong time. everything is closed—the nature reserves are closed, the Kinneret beaches are closed.”

While I was listening to the radio yesterday the afternoon program host had to continuously interrupt the person she was interviewing – about the war – with updates on a growing list of cities and towns in the Galilee where sirens were going off.

As this war continues, every night I line up everyone’s shoes in my family by the door in a neat row in case there an air raid siren sounds overnight and we have to dash quickly to our apartment building’s bomb shelter. That came in handy twice last week when we were awakened by missiles shot towards central Israel from Hezbollah. I tell my teenage kids to be as aware of their surroundings outside as possible, not to scroll through their phones as they walk, to keep their backs to walls and bus stops, lest they become easier prey in terror attacks which we hear of in growing frequency.

Two weeks ago, the night an Iranian-made Hezbollah drone exploded on an Israeli army training base, killing, as we would find out soon after, four 19-year-old recruits, I was texting with a friend. She was at a nearby hospital to where the attack occurred having brought her son there after he hurt himself at home in a cooking accident. While they were waiting to be seen in the emergency room, the secretary nearby was fielding calls from mothers trying to locate their sons.

As my eyes began to cloud reading her words, the wail of an air raid siren sounded in my neighborhood in Tel Aviv and across central Israel.

My tears would have to wait.