'I hope it is behind us' Jerusalem's cautious return to normality after night of missiles

Noa Moshytz's home in northern Israel doesn't have a bomb shelter, so as warnings of the Iranian attack mounted late on Saturday night, she took her six-month-old daughter, Mayan, and drove to her mother's home in Jerusalem.

They got to the house just after midnight. Barely an hour later they were racing to the saferoom, as air raid sirens wailed and arcs of falling debris from ballistic missiles that had been intercepted lit up the night sky over the city.

"It was crazy, but here we are at the market," she said the next morning, out shopping in central Mahane Yehuda, and barely looking tired. "In Israel, we come back to normality very fast."

Saturday had been an ominous day, with the country poised between fear and disbelief, in the wake of increasingly strong US warnings that Tehran could break with decades of "strategic restraint" by staging its first direct strikes on Israel.

Then at 11pm local time a military spokesman announced that Iran had launched dozens of drones, which were now just "hours away".

An intense terrifying wait began to see if any of Iran's weapons would hit their targets.

The US had been warning for days that Iran planned a significant attack on Israel, in retaliation for a missile strike on Iran's consulate in Damascus on 1 April, which killed a top Iranian commander and several of the country's diplomats.

The only question had been when, and where. Increasingly, it looked as if it would be on Saturday night or yesterday morning, with Israeli territory - not its interests abroad - as the target.