Today at the entrance to my college I saw a notice: Have you seen this man? … missing since Thursday’s bombings.. tattoo on left shoulder…

The desperate tone of the notice sent a shiver down my spine. So far I’ve been quite blasé about the bombings: living through so many of them in Israel made me develop a thick skin. In the mid-1990s, when it was still shocking and new, I used to listen to the news for days. But during the last few years, like many people, I detached myself emotionally, and developed a practical routine. Whenever I’d heard of a bombing, I would try to find out the location, and assess if there’s any chance someone I knew had been hurt. Sometimes I would make some phone calls to make sure everybody’s OK. And then I would move on.

But I’ve never seen notices like this in Jerusalem. Israel is such a small place that always, within hours, all the casualties were identified. Here it was different. London is so huge and anonymous. They haven’t retrieved all the bodies from the tube yet. And there are so many hospitals where somebody may be lying unconscious. I thought of the agony of the family, waiting for days for any bit of information, searching the hospitals again and again, hoping that against all odds... he wasn’t on that tube.