Do you know how long it’s been since the last attack?

This article first appeared on The Media Line.

“Israel Has Been Terror Attack Free For 7 hours, 26 minutes, 43 seconds … 44 seconds … 45 seconds,” the text and the ticking clock at the top of a new website proclaim. Below the header, a list of recent attacks against Israelis scroll by.

The website, “Israel Has Been Terror Attack Free For,” was set up by Australian based software developer Ofer Zelig in response to a new wave of violent Palestinian attacks since the start of October. “Terror attacks are not something too new to Israelis,” but the nature of the hostilities has changed recently, Zelig told The Media Line. Attacks with knives and vehicles against Israelis have become commonplace, so constant that people walking in the street are always looking over their shoulder, Zelig said. “It’s so frequent that you can measure the time between attacks in hours not days,” he explained.

So continuous are the reports of stabbings that news organizations are beginning to turn their attention to other subjects, the websites designer suggested, pointing to a similarity in the way in which Palestinian rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip into Israel were covered by journalists in the past.

“Rockets became so common that the media stopped reporting them – it’s not news anymore, people stop talking about it,” Zelig said. Now as people begin to adapt to the new threat the same thing is happening towards knife attacks.

In an effort to fight this tendency, Zelig created his website which was inspired by a similar page, “Israel Has Been Rocket Free For”, documenting artillery launches from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. The aim is to give people outside Israel an idea of the frequency of attacks.

But in creating the website its designer had to acknowledge a moral question – what constitutes a terrorist attack? “(I) include every terror attack which has Israeli casualties,” Zelig said, explaining that there are around a dozen other attacks each day which don’t cause casualties, such as stone throwing incidents, which are not included. Attacks against civilians and those against security forces are not differentiated for the purposes of the timer, nor is the geographic location of where an incident took place.

The website’s information comes from Israeli media outlets, which Zelig said he found generally trustworthy, though for accuracy he always corroborates sources against each other.

When covering attacks by Israelis against Palestinians, Zelig acknowledged that he wondered what to do. “I want to be fair, I want to include this stuff – on the other hand every person needs to promote stuff that is happening to their side, not the other way around,” Zelig said.

Other Israelis have found a more pleasant way to respond to the attacks. A new Facebook group called Eatifada – a play on the Arabic word intifada, urges Israelis to go eat out to help restaurants hard-hit by customers who are staying home because of the violence. The idea is for diners to take pictures of their meals and share them online to show their support and to encourage others to do the same.

“Out on the town…can't keep a good country down! ‪#‎eatifada,” Josh Sussman wrote on the group’s Facebook feed. “Join the ‪#‎Eatifada. The only proper Jewish response to terror!” Daniel Goldman, a second patron suggested.

Food-based responses have also been the basis for a number of efforts aimed at promoting interfaith unity. In the north of the country a group of Jewish citizens began handing out baked goods to Arab construction workers in their neighborhood while holding a sign which read “Peace of cake,” in English, Arabic, and Hebrew.

In another incident a hummus restaurant owner in northern Israel attracted attention when he offered to provide a second helping for free to diners at any tables made up of a mix of Jewish and Arab customers. The restaurant owner, Kobi Tzafrir, said that some customers even declined the free offer and paid in full in order to show their support for the initiative.