On Sunday just before 7:30 am deep in central Israel the eerie wail of air raid sirens could be heard warning of incoming missiles from Hezbollah. Bleary-eyed Israelis, many awoken from their sleep and still in pajamas scrambled for shelter. The sirens continued blaring throughout the day in cities and towns on the border with Lebanon, across the Galilee, and the Haifa and Tel Aviv areas, causing injuries and leaving some buildings and property burning from direct hits.

Even the rising chatter over a possible ceasefire did not prevent over 250 rockets  from being shot on one of the most intense days of fire into Israel since the war began. In fact, upping the ante – by both Hezbollah and Israel seems to be the very point.

Meanwhile everyday Lebanese and Israelis suffer – especially the Lebanese where almost 100 people were killed in strikes including ones in central Beirut. Hezbollah issued a statement: “If Beirut is hit, so will Tel Aviv.” So the talk might be of ceasefire, but the reality is war.

“We don’t have security in this country, there’s firing on us here and all over,” a middle-aged woman in Haifa, her eyes wide with fear after a building near her was hit, shouted in the microphone of a TV reporter. “How much longer will we have to live without feeling safe?”

“Where are the shelters?” bemoaned one of her neighbors. Many homes in Israel are without shelters in their individual homes or apartments let alone communal ones in their buildings or close enough to reach when one only has a minute to safely reach one. In areas bordering Lebanon like Nahariya there’s only 15 seconds to reach shelter.

In Tel Aviv, where I live, the siren caught me just as I had come home from walking my dog, just after 1 pm. I raced downstairs to the building shelter, immediately making a mental count of where my family was: two kids at school, husband en route to the airport. Everyone checked in on the family Whatsapp chat.

My son, a ninth grader had been at gym class in a large city park near his school. He sent over a video he managed to film while racing with his classmates looking for shelter. It captures them hurdling over a low wall, landing with audible thuds on the pavement as they race headlong across a street towards an apartment building. For a second the camera flickers to the cloudy sky in search of rocket interceptions overhead.

While he was filming that jarring scene--  one that would leave me addled and agitated for the rest of the day-- I was in our bicycle storage room that doubles as the building bomb shelter. The booms were loud, especially loud. We’d find out later of direct hits in neighboring city of Petah Tikvah, not a usual Hezbollah target. Next to me was a neighbor, holding her newborn son, their little gray dog named Toot, proudly guarding them both. Most of us in the building met the baby for the first time when he was just four days old, still nameless ahead of his briss, after another siren sounded. But he had his first visit in this dusty, crammed space even sooner--  the day he returned from the hospital when a drone was on the loose and sheltering in place was again in order.

I asked what his name was, this sweet, pure six-pound new arrival to our mad world. “His name is Nuri,” his mother replied. It’s an Arabic name that Israeli Jews also sometimes use. It means “My light." Light, hope is of course what we all need in any language.

But as if on cue National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir entered stage (far) right on Monday, just as his colleague Defense Minister Israel Katz was discussing the cease-fire deal with U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East Policy Dan Shapiro, the top Pentagon official responsible for the region who is trying to help broker a truce with Hezbollah. Despite the top Israeli military brass having declared military goals largely met in both Lebanon and Gaza, Ben Gvir has swooped in – as he has repeatedly during negotiations with Hamas – to play the role of the spoiler. Again he dangles the “Total Victory” card to say stopping the battle against Hezbollah now would be a “grave mistake.”

Meanwhile, more soldiers are dying – Israel has now passed the 800 mark since the war began. Military reservists are so exhausted – some having served over 250 days, their families and businesses worn bare by their absence – they have stopped showing up for duty.

One of the soldiers who died most recently was a 20-year-old grandson of Brig. Gen. (res.) Asaf Agmon named Gur Kehati. He was killed while facilitating the entry of a 71-year-old settler, Ze'ev Ehrlich, who was allowed into the fighting zone in southern Lebanon illegally.

At his funeral Agmon eulogized his grandson: "The blood of Gur and 800 soldiers is on our hands because we're not rising up, not stopping, and not shouting 'Enough.' The messianic figures and false rabbis shout 'Vengeance is the Lord's,' and you send our soldiers to the slaughter like sheep."