From the heart of Jerusalem: Travail of two cities

You say Shma with your children and tuck them into their beds. After a tiring day of work, you have almost reached your day’s end as well, and soon you flick off your own light and climb into your warm, inviting bed. House lights are turning out one by one throughout your neighborhood until the whole town is sleeping in undisturbed darkness, peace, and serenity.
But outside your town, just three kilometers away, someone else is wide awake. Under a glazing light in Gaza, he works through the night. He is setting up a rocket. And what he wants is to destroy your sleeping neighborhood, to kill your family.
Moments later you’re wrenched out of sleep by the blasting Code Red. Awoken with a terrifying jolt of panic, you now have fifteen seconds until fatal impact. Your first thought: Where are the children? Twelve seconds. You frantically dash to your children’s room where you see them crying under their blankets. Eight seconds. You grab the crying children. Seven seconds. You sprint out of the room. Six Seconds. Down the stairs. Four seconds. Down the hall. Two seconds. Into the shelter. You’re alive, but alive with terror. This was very normal.
My yeshiva visited Sderot and a local resident explained how he had become so accustomed to such terrorizing events that the morning after a terrorist attack he would not even remember that he had woken up in the middle of the night and ran to the shelter. It was just that ordinary. Sometimes at the end of the day a friend would ask him where he was during the rocket earlier and he would not even remember that there had been a rocket attack that day. Running to the shelter was like getting a cup of water. It was a basic necessity, a routine, no longer memorable.