My wife and I were on vacation in China for three weeks when Operation Protective Edge began on July 8th, 2014. We discussed whether or not we would delay our flight back home to Tel Aviv, but ultimately decided that the danger was superficial. We returned home a week ago on Wednesday, July 16th, early in the morning when a ceasefire agreement was announced. We were happy to hear that we were going to miss this round of fighting. Unfortunately Hamas rejected this agreement, saying that they were not consulted during the drafting of the agreement by Egypt and Israel.Most international flights to Tel Aviv arrive after midnight, so that early morning we unpacked and cleaned the apartment, where the bathroom drainpipe had been "repaired" by our overeager landlord, leaving broken tiles everywhere. All in-all it seemed like a normal day, and we looked forward to getting back to work.Around 9:30 AM, the code red alert went on in Tel Aviv. It was my wife's first time experiencing a rocket attack, and she looked at me with wide eyes while I grabbed the keys and a shirt. "Where do we go? Where do we go?" She asked frantically, as we fled the apartment. "To the stairwell," I said grabbing her hand. I'm a calm, collected man in the face of danger In the stairwell we were joined by another tenant above us, who kindly kept her distance while I put on my shirt. A sort of camaraderie emerges with your neighbors during these code red alerts. Neighbors that we had never spoken with over the last year began to ask us questions, "Oh, you're married? Yes, me too, unfortunately my husband was called up to the army." An Ethiopian Jewish woman called to her husband to stay in the stairwell for longer as another rocket exploded above us, stopped by the iron dome. After a few minutes we all returned to our lives, eating breakfast and continuing with our days.A morning attack and an evening attack seemed to be the pattern that had emerged in the Tel Aviv area. Most of my Israeli coworkers believed that Hamas wants to remind everyone during the morning commute, and then also make the evening news everyday. Thankfully, Hamas doesn't have enough missile batteries to overwhelm the Iron dome, so they are reduced to what amounts to frightening firecrackers. Still an Israeli died due to shrapnel and an Israeli Bedouin was killed in the desert Another humanitarian ceasefire went into effect Thursday, July 17th with the stated goal of permitting transport. Hamas fired during the cease-fire and another cease-fire was rejected by Hamas the following morning, on Friday, July 18th. Hamas' preconditions for a cease-fire require ending of the blockade on Gaza, and the re-release of prisoners given up for Gilad Shalit. This is too much for Netanyahu, and resulted in a ground invasion; Israel said they had found evidence of terrorist tunnels, which Hamas intended to use for the kidnapping and murder of Israeli civilians.In Tel Aviv, since the ground invasion, the missile attacks were more sporadic. On Saturday and Sunday (The 19th and 20th), we didn't even have a single attack, compared to the average of two per day. This led some of my colleagues to say that Hamas' long range rockets had likely been destroyed or used up, a prediction proved wrong by missile attacks on the 21st & 22nd.Fear does strange things to people; at work everyone became more agitated. Normally left-leaning, liberal scientists become hard-line conservatives in the face of a few firecrackers. One colleague of mine admonished Barrack Obama, saying he should, "Just go home!" While I suppose the home she referred to was Kenya, why he had anything to do with Hamas' attack perplexed me, and she responded, "He is weak in Syria and made a bad economy."Comments about the nature of Arabs, being a "culture of destruction" are more common. One colleague pointed out that while Gaza is very small, so is Hong Kong and Singapore, but they are great places to live. "We give Gaza electricity, and all they do is make bombs from it," he said. I replied that probably Gaza needs more Chinese if they want to emulate Singapore. It's best to remain neutral during wartime political discussions; most people here have relatives on the front-line and no amount of impassioned logical discourse could persuade someone who's children are in danger, even if that danger is superficial compared to statistically relevant realities like traffic accidents.My wife and I, being foreign scientists living here, hope to hunker down and wait it out. We decided to skip going to a movie this weekend and stayed at home. "Where do you go when a bomb comes?" My wife asked."I suppose to a building," I responded."What if it's locked? It's Shabbat." She countered."Hmm... What's that Chinese site where you can download movies?"Good thing the internet is working quite well.