Steven is a Messianic Jew who works as a tour guide for groups or tourists visiting Israel.

 “At 6:30 in the morning I left my house to pick up a couple coming from the port of Haifa”, he recalls of the day the attacks took place. “When I turned on the radio, I heard shelling”. At first, Steven didn’t understand “how serious the situation was”, he explains, but he later told the visitors he was receiving that a war had started.

“We know that when terrorists manage to infiltrate into Israeli territory and attack people, other terrorists who are inactive can be encouraged to join”. This is why everyone across Israel was in tension, not only in the border regions with Gaza, were “very tense”, he explains.

“Nothing works, people are still in shock”

As he shares his impressions with us, on 10 October, “virtually nothing is working in Israel. Everything is closed, the shops and the malls. People are in shock, they still can’t understand what has happened”. People say there hasn’t been a massacre of Jews like there was on Saturday since the Holocaust. People are scared”, he says.

Steven thinks “Hamas knew that the best time to attack was now because the political situation in Israel is weak. More than half of the population is against Prime Minister Netanyahu. The left-wing parties accuse him of being a dictator, and also generals and army leaders have told the government that they are not willing to serve in certain contexts”.

The difficulty of foreseeing what will happen next

Steven is one of the hundreds of thousands of Israelis waiting to see when his work will resume. He usually works with large groups of tourists of around 50 people. “Next week I was supposed to receive a group with four buses from the United States, but at the moment there are no flights”.

All the non-Israeli airlines have cancelled their flights. He is not positive about the short-term”. As long as the situation is as it is, we are not going to be able to work in tourism in Israel”. Several groups he was going to tour through Holy Land have cancelled their trips.

“This is my only source of income, the only way I can provide for my family. We don’t know what is going to happen. We will see how we get out of this situation”.

“This war could go on for months, maybe three or four months”, he concludes.

Read the two other testimonies of foreigners in Israel: “Nobody thought that something like this could happen on Israeli land”.