Saturday night. I feel at a loss for words tonight, but I also want to write something because it's been since Wednesday since we've written, and tomorrow we are going to go up to Jerusalem until Tuesday, so I think writing something would be in order. Nothing much has changed since the last time I wrote, except that Barak is out of Lebanon and being visited by his family as we speak. Here's an interesting piece of information -- they take the soldier's cell phones from them before they go into Lebanon because they can be tracked with the GPS feature in the phone. But they have someone assigned to each platoon whose job it is to call the parents and report on the well-being of each soldier. So that way the parents get some news every few days. It is nerve-wracking for the parents (needless to say).

More and more rockets are being fired into Israel, though none have fallen in Haifa for a week. Today 50 rockets fell on Kyriat Shmona in an hour. Over 3,000 have been fired into Israel in the past 24 days. The death toll mounts, and of course so do the injuries. Tonight it was reported that the US and France have come up with a draft proposal for a cease-fire resolution for the UN Security Council, but I don't think it has a chance on either side. The Israelis are definitely not ready to stop fighting, chasing as they are after the illusory victory which would be disarmament of Hezbollah and a demilitarized zone between Lebanon and Israel. And Hezbollah has already won a huge victory no matter what happens, because they will be able to say that they held Israel off for x-number of days even though there were only 1000 of them against the mighty Israeli army/air-force, all its high-technology notwithstanding. It's bad. It's pretty clear that, as one columnist wrote today, the end of this war just marks the first day of the waiting period until the next one.

People are beginning to go back to work and try to get back to normal. Everyone is quite sick of all of it. Tomorrow starts a new week. Perhaps things will be better by next Shabbat! We'll be back on Tuesday, perhaps with some interesting pictures...

Love,
Pat