TEL AVIV — For five days, Iran’s ballistic missile salvos against Israel have torn through residential buildings and killed two dozen civilians, set cars and infrastructure ablaze, and have Israelis questioning their already fractured sense of security. In Tel Aviv, Israel’s otherwise bustling financial and cultural hub, the streets have gone quiet as schools and nonessential businesses have closed, public transportation has been scaled back and the military has banned public gatherings. Iran has fired missiles primarily at Tel Aviv and its surroundings, as well as at Haifa, a key port city in the north, after Israel began attacking Iranian military and nuclear sites Friday.

Some residents of Israel’s commercial capital, which has a population of about 500,000, have left their homes to stay with family outside the city. Others have stayed, fleeing to shelters at night, which is when most of the missiles rain down.

Dark smoke billows from a fire in Herzliya, Israel, on June 17, following a morning barrage of Iranian rockets. (Video: Heidi Levine/The Washington Post)

“The fact that you don’t know if the missiles are about to fall on you, that we are now living with this feeling of helplessness, it’s insane,” said Ella Keren, a nurse who was with her two young daughters at a Tel Aviv playground Tuesday.

Keren and her family are among the many in Israel trying to fill the unstructured days after sleepless nights. She said she does not see herself as an “anxious person,” but since the conflict with Iran started, Keren vacillates between “extreme fear, that if something happens — if I die — I will be separated from my girls,” on the one hand, and “radical acceptance, that this is just it,” on the other.

For the past 20 months, since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israelis have grown used to war and a weakening sense of security. Israeli towns and cities absorbed waves of rocket, missile and drone attacks from Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Iran. But the conflict that began last week feels different in scope and scale, some Israelis say, inspiring either hope that this era of insecurity will finally change, or fear that Israel may be stuck in an endless cycle of war.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that the operation in Iran, cast as an effort to eliminate its nuclear program, will go on for “as many days as it takes.” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has said Iran will continue its “legitimate self-defense against Israel.” In a social media post Tuesday, President Donald Trump demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” amid speculation the United States could be planning to join in the attacks.

But on Israel’s home front, the casualties, including 24 deaths and more than 600 injured, have more Israelis wondering about the value of their missile defense systems; in recent years, one layer of that system, the Iron Dome, was estimated by the Israeli military to have intercepted more than 90 percent of the rockets fired from Gaza.

But the missiles fired from Iran are much more sophisticated. Since Friday, several have penetrated, including those equipped with heavier warheads, some of which have directly hit residential buildings in Israeli cities. More than 2,700 people have been evacuated from their homes, according to government figures.

“Each time, it’s like a new extreme, with everything even more uncertain, seeming even farther away from ending,” said Ido Tal Mor, 37, a theater teacher and Pilates instructor. He said the crisis has eroded what feelings of safety he had left after the Oct. 7 attacks.

On Friday night, during the first barrage, Tal Mor ran to the basement shelter in his building as alerts sounded on his phone warning of incoming missiles. He said he and his neighbors clung to the walls as the booms grew more deafening, shaking the foundation.

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When Tal Mor left the shelter, in a desperate search for his cat, he saw that the explosion had blown out the windows in his apartment. It took him days to recover from the panic attack he suffered that night, he said. He found his cat, but learned that buildings only one street over were downed in the attack during the same barrage Friday, trapping his neighbors under the rubble. He doesn’t know if they survived.

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Tal Mor is now staying at his parents’ house in the coastal city of Hadera, in northern Israel. But it also “does not feel safe,” he said.

Israeli officials have urged citizens to abide by the directives of the Home Front Command, but overnight Monday, four people were killed in the central Israeli city of Petah Tikva when a missile landed between two safe rooms inside a residential building.

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That same night, three others were killed in a missile strike on an oil refinery in Haifa. In Bnei Brak, a city near Tel Aviv, the shock wave from a missile strike collapsed a home, killing an 80-year-old man.

Dana Avesar, 34, works for a start-up in Tel Aviv but said she relocated with her husband to his flower and pineapple farm in Talmei Yosef in southern Israel over the weekend. The Iranian strikes, she said, reinforce “that the defense can never be bulletproof.”

Avesar said her apartment in Tel Aviv was only a few blocks from a building that was hit early Monday. But she hasn’t checked whether her building was damaged. She is too afraid to find out.

“I don’t want to go to sleep, because I don’t want another thing to happen,” she said. “But I also feel like, for the first time, this escalation with Iran offers a glimmer of hope, because it is a big move, and it could lead to a big change, and maybe, maybe, it is a unique chance to build a more long-term defense.”

The Chinese embassy in Israel has urged Chinese citizens to return home or leave the country via land border crossings as soon as possible, on grounds that the security situation has deteriorated and Israeli airspace remained closed.

“At present, the Israeli-Iranian conflict continues to escalate, with civilian facilities damaged and civilian casualties increasing, making the security situation even more severe,” the embassy warned in a Tuesday notice on WeChat.

The notice recommended Chinese citizens to leave via the land crossing towards Jordan.