- Elad Zmora and his family were woken by sirens on October 7 and rushed to their bomb shelter.
- He works as a product team manager at HP in Israel and volunteers for the border patrol police.
This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Elad Zmora, a 46-year-old product team manager at HP in Israel. Zmora's employment has been verified by Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
My family and I were woken up last Saturday morning at about 6:30 a.m. to the sound of a siren.
It took about 10 seconds to realize the siren was real and a further 20 seconds to wake our four children and get into our bomb shelter. My youngest, who is eight, was confused.
After the siren, we started getting news of what happened at the Supernova trance music festival in the Negev desert. Friends and family started calling us and people were sharing news on WhatsApp.
During the first 48 hours after the Hamas attack, we were in a state of emotional shock.
My head was blasting with all the information. I remember when there were Iraqi rocket attacks on Israel during the Gulf War when I was a teen, but for me, it doesn't compare to what happened on Saturday. This has been the most emotional week of my life.
We started getting news last Saturday about Hamas penetrating villages of the Kibbutz and slaughtering people in the streets. My village is about 30 kilometers (18 miles) from the Gaza Strip, which is about a 20-minute drive. It wasn't until near the end of the day that my thinking started shifting from being scared and confused to moving forward.
I'm a volunteer of the Israeli border police, called Magav, which is also responsible for countryside policing. Usually it would involve helping someone with a flat tire or driving someone to a hospital. It's a volunteer force that usually involves patrolling the fields and attending to noise nuisances from a party. But on Saturday we knew we had to do more to keep our village safe.
One man who manages the patrol unit took us to the local armory and gave us weapons. We started to patrol the area that night to make sure we were prepared in case there was an attack.
In my day-to-day life I don't carry a gun. I don't have a stance that is either for or against guns, but as I am a father of four children, I felt the risk of one of my children getting access to it was too high and outweighed the need for me to have one to protect my family.
After the first 24 hours, there was a massive draft of reserve soldiers and the prime minister declared we were in a state of war.
By Monday, the shock began to wear off and I switched to being productive. I could think more clearly about what I needed to do like help my family, village, and country as well as continue serving HP customers. We need to ensure our business remains strong and resilient as one day, hopefully soon, the war will be over.
Many of these customers have become friends over time and I've been getting hundreds of messages from them asking me how me and my family were doing. Sometimes it brings me to tears because it's a real friendship that's developed over the years.
A large portion of our workforce at HP in Israel has joined the army reserve and now we need to cover for them. The vast majority of our customers are not in Israel, and from a business perspective, it is important for us that they will not feel something is different. We still have a strong commitment to support them.
One day this week I had a Zoom call with a customer and I took it from my bomb shelter, which is also my home office.
During the morning I have calls with European customers and at night with American customers because of the time difference. I had just finished a patrolling shift and didn't have time to get changed so I did it in my uniform.
Before Saturday, I would work mostly from the HP office and sometimes at home. Now the policy is that we can work from home.
Management has been understanding and empathetic and told us to do what we can, without compromising our safety or our family's wellbeing, which they made sure we understand is the first priority.
They have also been very supportive, and they manage to still have direct contact with workers who were called to join the army reserve and are supporting their families.
When I'm patrolling with the volunteers at night, my shift will start at about 2:00 a.m. and finish by 10:00 a.m. I'll get an hour of sleep and start working immediately. Collectively, we are out patrolling 24/7.
Sometimes I'll take another nap during the day and work until my tasks are complete then try to find another way to help my community either by being a handyman for neighbors or by delivering supplies for a volunteer logistics center for army units.
In our team at HP in Israel, we mapped out who's been drafted to the army and made sure that whatever they were in charge of was taken care of by someone else.
We have supplies at our local supermarket but the situation fluctuates. In the first three days, people were hysterical and cleared everything from the shelves and started to stockpile. It reminded me of the early days of the pandemic. We try to minimise going to the supermarket as it means risking exposure to unprotected zones and we have most of the things we need.
It's not a great feeling when you're out driving your car and suddenly a siren goes off. We also have an app in Israel that has a disgusting sounding alarm to notify people to get into shelters.
Within seconds of sirens going off, you can hear Iron Dome missiles whooshing above while you're lying on the ground waiting for it to be over. Sometimes you can hear a loud boom and almost feel the sound waves go through you as the missiles intercept rockets.
Now we are all in mourning but there is no time to grieve as we have to keep moving forward.