Wednesday, July 12, 2006
When the world explodes
From Cnn.com:
Hezbollah guerrillas killed seven Israeli soldiers and captured two more Wednesday, prompting Israeli airstrikes and military raids inside southern Lebanon, Israeli officials said...

The valleys along the Israeli-Lebanese border thundered with artillery fire and clouds of blue-gray smoke could be seen rising above Lebanese positions.


I had a dream last night.

I'm not big on dreams. I rarely remember them. I remembered this one when I woke up. I may remember it for many more mornings to come. In my dream I saw the hills that we can look down on from the field school here at Dan. A line of explosions peppered them, like those small unimpressive bursts you see in fireworks displays. That's all I remember.

It was all normal this morning on the dig site until about 9:15 am. That's when we heard the first boom. Nothing that unusual, really. We're in Israel after all, and we've heard target practice before. But then a second boom, and a third, and more with increasing frequency, and they seemed to get closer. One was so close I could feel it shake my insides. We later learned there is an Israeli artillery battery not 2 km from the dig site. All we were hearing was Israeli fire into southern Lebanon.

There is a bomb shelter at the field school, and we spent a couple of hours inside this afternoon and have since been given the clear to be outside. But the shelling has continued now only with brief reprieves for the last nine hours. At one point 15 shots were fired within 30 seconds. From a lookout at the field school I can see smoke billowing up into sky from a Lebanese border town.

Rest assured. We are safe. Plans are already in the works to bring us home much sooner than we had anticipated.

Keep us in your prayers, but don't lose your heads. We're in good hands. Psalm 91 makes good reading these days.

UPDATE: We have a flight out of Tel-Aviv at 11:40 pm on Friday morning. A bus is picking us up within the hour to take us to Jerusalem where we will spend the night at JUC.

posted by Peter at 11:43 AM
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