FOR THE PAST FOUR DAYS, as soon as I open my daily newspaper my room is filled with gunfire and swirling concrete dust. My phone screen plays the heart-rending cries of those burying their loved ones. Then there are the visuals of fleeing families, and those in hospitals—caught between the worlds of the living and the dead. Tear-streaked faces stare at me and I am unable to say at a glance whether they are Israeli or Palestinian. How does it matter? A life is a life.

Having visited Israel and having friends there, to me this is a conflict that hit quite close to home. One of my first calls was to Ido Dissentshik, former editor-in-chief of the Ma’ariv newspaper and former chairman of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s executive board. The Ma’ariv was known as a centrist paper and Ido is known for not pulling his punches, as you can see in his interview with Senior Assistant News Editor Ajish P. Joy.

In journalism, some meetings can turn providential, as we experienced this time. Three months ago, Deputy Chief of Bureau (Delhi) Namrata Biji Ahuja was in Israel. She visited the headquarters of the Cyber Dome system and also met the founder of the Iron Dome air-defence system, Brigadier General (res) Daniel Gold. The brigadier general is now the director of Israel’s Directorate of Defence Research & Development.

While everyone is pointing at the alleged failure of the Iron Dome, I think Gold was quite pragmatic in his conversation with Namrata. I spotted two points that had him concerned. One, larger salvos. Though the Iron Dome was designed to handle multiple short-range rockets, the size of the salvos was increasing and software updates were being made to combat them. Last weekend saw, perhaps, the largest salvo of rockets ever fired at Israel. Hamas obviously did not intend all of them to strike home, but they calculated correctly that a swarm would overwhelm the Iron Dome.

Two, cost. The cost of peace is eternal vigilance, and the cost of vigilance can run into hills of dollars or shekels. Gold briefly touched upon the Iron Beam high-power laser system which was being integrated into the Iron Dome to “significantly reduce costs associated with intercepting threats”.

This week Namrata interviewed former IDF intelligence official Brigadier General (res) Yossi Kuperwasser, while Deputy Chief of Bureau (Delhi) Mandira Nayar met Ambassador Adnan Abu Alhaija, Palestine’s representative to India. While our cover story is quite comprehensive, dear reader, I wish we never had to write this.

I must acknowledge the excellent sports coverage in this issue. Deputy Chief of Bureau (Sports) Neeru Bhatia interviewed Union Minister of Sports Anurag Thakur after the stellar show at the Asian Games. My thanks to the minister for talking to THE WEEK. Subeditor Diya Mathew interviewed bridge player Jaggy Shivdasani, who was India’s oldest Asian Games medallist this time. Chief Associate Editor and Director Riyad Mathew interviewed Australian quick Glenn McGrath, and Neeru spoke to our own legend Kapil Dev for the World Cup coverage.

Coming back to Ido, our families have been bound for two generations. His father, editor Arie Dissentshik, and my father were great friends, and then he and I served together on the International Press Institute’s board of directors. I remember a tribute that Ido wrote in The Jerusalem Post about his mother, Shulamit Dissentshik, who was a fighter in the Irgun paramilitary organisation and later a political activist. In the article, Ido wrote about a typical school morning in Tel Aviv. “Sniper bullets fired from the Hassan Bek Mosque in Jaffa would fly overhead as we made our way to school every day,” he wrote. “We were already used to being careful and hiding in stairwells to hide from snipers… fighting in the War of Independence.”

I somehow thought that those days were past for Israeli and Palestinian children. How wrong I was!