Nothing much has happened today. At least not yet.

We did have four or so alerts since I posted last night. Only one (or possibly two) led to alarms. I went down to the shelter for all but one of them. For that one, I was visiting family elsewhere in the House, so I stayed with them.

Home Front Command has announced that they may be cutting back on the number of alerts. They have divided the country into four regions for those, so if it looks like there's a chance of an alarm anywhere in the center of the country (a fairly large area including both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem), they'll sound the alert. From what I can tell, the alarms, showing a much higher risk of missiles or fragments landing, each cover a much smaller area. (I think I have read that there are 1800 distinct areas for those.)

The alerts are supposed to precede the alarms by ten minutes. After the alarms, here in Herzliya we have only a minute and a half before things might start falling on us from the sky.

This means that there should be far fewer alerts that don't indicate real danger. It does mean, however, that there may be more alarms that aren't preceded by alerts. In those cases, I, like many others here, may just stay in the hallway, rather than rushing down to the shelter. The hallways are reinforced enough to be adequate shelter for all but the largest Iranian bombs.

I think they started the alerts fairly recently. (Perplexity thinks it was in April 2025.) Someone now has probably done some statistical analysis of whether more people have been injured (often from falling while running for shelters) with or without the preliminary alerts. Or maybe the people in charge got tired of their families complaining to them.

I'm confident that I can get to shelter in enough time after an alarm, and definitely after alerts. We'll see how this plays out in the next few days.