‘I was woken up by several very loud bangs’

After heading to bed with the window open so as to be able to hear the siren, the 23-year-old was woken at around 1.40am by “six or seven loud bangs. This was the interception of the iron dome. Thirty seconds later, the siren went off and we ran down to the communal shelter in the basement of our building.”

After the banging stopped, the residents had to wait the requisite 10 to 15 minutes “in case any shrapnel fell from the sky”.

Hanna Wine, who said that Israelis were used to the drill when a bomb siren went off[Missing Credit]

Hanna, who is a student and a dance teacher, passed the time by “checking the news on my phone and calling friends who were in other shelters and my family”.

She said that although Jerusalemites had been surprised that the attack was on their city rather than the Golan or the south of Israel, running into a bomb shelter when you hear a siren “is not too big a deal – It sounds a lot more dramatic from afar.”

The next morning, apart from schools and universities being closed and big gatherings being cancelled at least until the end of Monday, “everything felt pretty normal”.

“The news is much bigger for people not living in Israel. People here are so used to sirens going off that it doesn’t throw us very much now. On the other hand, it’s also sad that we’re so used to it.”

While Hanna may sound blasé about the drill of running into a bomb shelter, she doesn’t take for granted how much worse the consequences could have been were it not for the Iron Dome and the Israeli Air Force and its allies. “Everyone is very impressed with the defence system – and super grateful.”