by Xinhua writer Wang Shang

CAIRO, March 29 (Xinhua) -- War announces itself in various ways: strategies and tactics, retaliation and escalation, bombs and missiles, targets and tolls ...

But for people who live in it, war is something much smaller and more intimate. It seeps into the home. That is what binds Tehran and Tel Aviv more than missiles ever could.

The two cities now stand on opposite sides of a raging conflict, but they share the same sky -- and the same dread of what crosses it these days.

In Tehran, the war began for my Iranian friend Saeed as soon as he bought a pine shrub. He had wanted one for years, one of those modest household desires that never seems urgent enough. But in the uneasy days before the bombing started, as the shadows of war thickened with a visible U.S. military buildup across the Middle East, he suddenly felt that postponing small joys had become its own kind of folly.

So he brought the shrub home and planted it on his terrace at once, as if he knew it might be his last chance to do it with an untroubled mind.

The next day, the bombs started falling.

In Tel Aviv, war arrived for Tamara, an Israeli friend of mine, not with a shrub but with a kitten. During the "12-day war" between Israel and Iran in June 2025, she and her husband were returning home from a shelter when they found a newborn cat shivering in a bush.

The couple took it home and named him Namaron, meaning "little tiger" in Hebrew. Their older cat, King, greeted the newcomer with the hostility of someone who had not been consulted. Now, just months later, Namaron is already facing his second war before he has even finished growing up, and his relationship with King has changed.

Tamara's house has a safe room. In the first days of the latest conflagration, upon hearing sirens, King would run under the bed, and Namaron into the closet. The couple tried to bring them into the safe room together, but the heavy steel door frightened them more than the noise outside.

Now her husband wraps King and Namaron in a blanket when the alert begins. It doesn't calm them, but it seems to hold their panic in place. So the people go in, and the cats stay outside.

When the all-clear sounds, they come out to find the cats still in their corners, sometimes trembling. Then come the rituals of comfort: treats, gentle hands, and longer embraces.

It is an imperfect arrangement. Most arrangements during the war are.

As it happens, Saeed and his wife also have two cats. During airstrikes, he and his wife retreat with them to a windowless room and sit together while the building shudders. Some strikes landed so close that it felt like an earthquake.

Before the war erupted, they had taped the windows with wide adhesive strips and moved the furniture against the glass. But when a strike hit a nearby fuel facility on March 8, the walls shook so hard that their precautions seemed almost laughable.

The noise terrifies the cats. When the blasts come, they freeze, eyes wide and ears bent back, and then bolt for the bed. The couple tries to pull them to their makeshift shelter every time, but doesn't always succeed.

Both of their cats suffer from underlying health conditions. Saeed often finds himself worrying not only about the next strike but also about what sustained fear does to an already vulnerable creature.

Night is the hardest. Saeed goes to bed each night knowing an explosion might wake him, and that knowledge changes sleep itself. The cats have started sleeping closer to the couple, as if warmth were protection. Often, Saeed feels them startle before he fully awakens. Their fear reaches him before the sound does.

What has changed, too, is the relationship between King and Namaron. On ordinary days, they remain rivals. But when the sirens start, they now gather on the same bed. They have somehow agreed to share the "safe place."

Namaron curls against King's side. King, who hisses at the kitten every day, allows it. Sometimes King even extends a paw toward the younger cat, not quite touching, just close enough to suggest a truce born not of affection, but of shared alarm.

On Saeed's terrace, the pine shrub is still alive. Every morning he checks it. It has become less a plant to him than a question he does not dare to ask, or perhaps does not want answered: will any of this survive?

Like the cats, the shrub does not know geopolitics or war. It simply grows, slowly, indifferent to the human madness around it.

Perhaps that's why it comforts him -- and us all. In both Tehran and Tel Aviv, amid wailing sirens and shattered routines, life still reaches for the smallest form of continuity: a plant watered in the morning, a kitten rescued from a bush, and two cats huddling together when the sky turns hostile.

But that is not peace. That is what war has left. ■