Social media posters and talking heads claim that the United States and Israel are losing the Iran war. On the ground in Tel Aviv, it doesn’t feel like it. Life in the city persists with a fair degree of normalcy, as the Islamic Republic’s dwindling missile and drone strikes have failed to damage the city significantly.
In the weeks leading up to the war, the general assumption—at least among my political and journalistic contacts—was that Iran would pummel Tel Aviv. The city had been hit only a few times during last summer’s 12-Day War. But many feared that Tehran, being more prepared this time, would saturate Israeli air defenses and cause tremendous casualties.
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This did not happen, fortunately. Washington and Jerusalem once again crippled the Islamic Republic with shocking speed, causing the daily volume of Iranian missile strikes to collapse by over 90 percent within the first few days. Tehran also miscalculated by attacking its Gulf State neighbors, diluting its offensive capacities. Israeli air defenses have intercepted over 90 percent of incoming Iranian missiles so far.
While a handful of hits have been devastating, the overall damage is a fraction of what many feared. Total civilian deaths attributable to Iranian strikes remain miraculously low—about 21 people, according to one recent count.
Accustomed to war, most Israelis have not panicked, and have instead calmly followed well-established wartime safety protocols. Just before an incoming strike, Israel’s warning system typically sends a “pre-alarm” to citizens’ phones, telling them to stay near a bomb shelter. A few minutes later, the regular air sirens blare, giving everyone 90 seconds to get inside. As the country’s shelters are ubiquitous and near impregnable, staying safe is easy for most Tel Avivians, though the situation is more complicated for the elderly, disabled, or parents of small children.
To pierce Israel’s air-defense system, the Iron Dome, the Islamic Republic has resorted to launching cluster rockets that disperse dozens of smaller bomblets. The bomblets are hard to intercept and have improved Iran’s hit rate.
The tradeoff is that, unlike ordinary ballistic-missile warheads, individual bomblets cannot destroy shelters. Their capacity to inflict mass casualties is therefore limited, and their use is restricted to property damage. To illustrate: one bomblet landed about 50 meters from the Airbnb at which I was staying last Sunday, destroying only the top apartment of a low-rise building and strewing rubble on an adjacent car. A conventional warhead would have wiped out the entire building and severely damaged most of the surrounding neighborhood—my apartment included.
That does not mean Israelis are not experiencing hardship. For example, a recent strike on the southern cities of Arad and Dimona left 200 injured—a national tragedy. More than 4,000 Israelis have been sent to hospitals for war-related reasons so far, though most injuries have not been severe. The strikes have also forced about 3,500 people to leave their homes. Residents have submitted more than 10,000 reimbursement claims to the government for missile-related property damage worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Nevertheless, the mood in Tel Aviv remains buoyant, even as many residents are exhausted by the frequent air sirens and sleepless nights. Shops, markets, cafes, and beaches are defiantly buzzing. Bomb-shelter raves are popular with the young. The streets are quieter than usual, but it’s almost possible to ignore the war between the sirens and 15-minute shelter visits.
Wartime memes have kept the national mood lighthearted, and every Tel Avivian to whom I have spoken has said the current situation is unexpectedly calmer than the 12-Day War. While underlying fear and anxiety persist, Israeli resilience is formidable.
Last week, I grabbed wine with a contact whose apartment was damaged by a missile. The shockwave from the blast blew out his windows and threw around his belongings, so he was staying in a government-funded hotel room during repairs.
Yet he marveled that the war was going better than anyone could have imagined. The sleepless nights were a small price to pay for crippling the Islamic Republic, he said. Having spent years in wartime Ukraine, where the destruction is much worse and bomb shelters are rare, I could not disagree.
Things are more dangerous in northern Israel, which Hezbollah is currently bombing. The short distance from there to southern Lebanon, where the Iranian proxy militia is based, means that residents have as little as 30 seconds of warning before an attack, if they receive any notice at all. Yet, the situation is improving, and Israel is even contemplating a ground invasion to dismantle Hezbollah’s military infrastructure. If successful, this would lop off another of Tehran’s tentacles.
Having failed to win on the real battlefield, the Islamic Republic has mobilized its supporters to flood social media with false claims, such as that the missile and drone strikes have reduced large swathes of Tel Aviv to ruin. This content leverages hyper-realistic AI video, along with mislabeled footage from old or unrelated conflicts, to demoralize the West and generate hundreds of millions of views. Journalists and civil-society actors who have tried to challenge these lies have faced intense harassment.
The war—and its attendant information war—have made reporting in Tel Aviv a rather bizarre experience. Like many others, I came here to bear witness to devastation that largely has not materialized. Elsewhere in the world, pundits fixate on the Strait of Hormuz, while online conspiracists insist that Iran is secretly winning. The gap between their perceptions and the reality Tel Avivians experience daily is profound.
Photo by AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP via Getty Images