"I wonder sometimes if it's worth opening at all," the restaurant owner tells us, pointing with a wide gesture at the rows of empty wooden tables. "We used to be 24/7. Now I wonder every day whether it's worth coming in from Tel Aviv."

It's 12.30 in the afternoon in downtown west Jerusalem. A good friend and I have met to go over old reporting adventures in Syria and Iraq. And to wonder at the present situation, the strangeness of it, and where things may be headed. We find we are the only diners in this once popular eating joint off the pedestrian promenade. We order anyway.

It would be an exaggeration to say the urban centres of central Israel are deserted at the moment. Things are running, people are going to work. Life continues. But high summer usually brings bustling and boisterous crowds on all the main pedestrian thoroughfares. And now everything is slow and quiet. An odd calm about it all. Everyone is waiting.

The killings of senior Lebanese Hezbollah official Fuad Shukr and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Beirut and Tehran, respectively, and almost certainly at the hands of Israel in both cases, have brought the 10-month-old war in the Middle East to a new plateau, where it is currently perched. The prospect of a dizzying plunge from this plateau into the abyss of all-out war suddenly seems very real.