Chana Belan was at home alone when she heard the blast. "It was incredibly loud. The house vibrated," she recalls. At first, she was too frightened to venture out onto the balcony of her home in the northern Israeli city of Haifa to check what had happened.
When she finally "summoned up enough courage" to go out, she discovered that a rocket fired by Hizbullah militants had landed some 300 metres from her home. "No one was hit," she says. "Luckily the rocket landed in an open field."
But she was shaken. Along with her husband, she decided that if there was another rocket attack, they would leave the city and travel south, out of range of Hizbullah's rockets.
They did not have to wait long - four hours later, around noon, rockets again slammed into Israel's third-largest city. They packed their bags and headed for family in Jerusalem.
"I've never had this feeling before, of being a refugee," she says. "I'm not here in Jerusalem of my own free will. Someone is forcing me to be here."
Hizbullah continued yesterday to fire dozens of rockets at Haifa and other towns across northern Israel.
Two brothers, aged three and nine, were killed when they were hit by a rocket as they played in the yard of their home in Nazareth, the largest Arab town in Israel. Fifteen civilians have been killed in rocket attacks in Israel since the fighting erupted a week ago.
While hundreds of Israelis in northern towns have travelled south to family, friends or hotels to escape the rockets, many have remained.
Those who haven't gone have spent much of the last week in bomb shelters or close to them. The tourism industry in northern Israel has been decimated and owners of businesses, unable to work and not sure how long the rocket attacks will continue, are wondering how they will recoup their losses.
Chana's husband, Rudi, who runs a surveying office, says his workers have already been off for four days. "Who is going to pay for the damage?" he wonders. "For how long will this go on."
Despite the price they are now paying, both Chana and Rudi, who are both in their late fifties, believe prime minister Ehud Olmert had no choice but to retaliate fiercely after Hizbullah militants crossed the border into Israel last week, killed three soldiers and took two more captive. Another five soldiers were killed when they gave chase into Lebanon.
"This war is justified," says Chana. "This was a blatant violation of our sovereignty. What's more, you have Hizbullah arming itself and deploying its rockets in the direction of Israel. When you have an occupation," she adds, "then it's more complicated. But we left Lebanon and there is no longer an [ Israeli] occupation there." Asked about the large number of civilian casualties in Lebanon - close to 300 Lebanese have been killed so far in the Israeli offensive - Chana says civilians have died because Hizbullah places its missiles in civilian areas.
"I am very, very sorry this is happening, but there is no choice. We are doing our best to neutralise their rockets without harming civilians, while they are firing to hit civilians."
Chana's views reflect the prevailing sentiment in Israel. Having pulled out of Lebanon in 2000 and returned to the UN-sanctioned border, Israelis are incensed that Hizbullah deployed some 12,000 rockets in south Lebanon, facing Israel, and continued to carry out cross-border attacks.
This sense of being "fed up", as some Israelis put it, has been bolstered by the continued firing of rockets by Palestinian militants from Gaza into Israel, even though Israel pulled out of the coastal strip 10 months ago.
An opinion poll released this week showed almost nine out of 10 Israelis backing the offensive in Lebanon. Mr Olmert and Israeli defence minister Amir Peretz are also enjoying unprecedented popularity.
In another poll, 78 per cent of respondents said they were satisfied with the prime minister's performance, while Mr Peretz got 72 per cent approval.
That popularity could be fleeting, though, if the fighting ends and Israel is unable to neutralise the threat posed by Hizbullah on its northern border.
Chana's demands are clear: "Please God, the [ captured] soldiers are alive and will be returned," she says.
"And there must be an arrangement ensuring that there is no one on the other side of the border who can build up an arsenal in order to harm us. Hizbullah must either be dismantled or kept far from the border. I don't want to live under the threat of missiles."