HADERA, ISRAEL - It is a Thursday evening at the Hadera central bus station and Yaron Meiner, an officer in the Israeli army, has just taken his next-to-last bus ride home from his base. The next time Meiner returns to his hometown in Hadera, he will travel back to the base in his own car.

That's because his father, Meir Meiner, a retired colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces who now lives in Cary, is worried that his son will become a victim of terrorism during his seven-hour weekly commute from the base near Tsfat in northern Israel to Hadera and back. So Yaron Meiner's father is buying him a car.

"I worry about him less when he's at the front than when he's at home or taking the buses," Meir Meiner said recently.

Meir Meiner and his wife Tova suffer as much from knowing how close their loved ones are to the terror as from the distance now separating them from home. In contrast, for the adult children, as for many Israelis, dealing with the danger has become a routine part of their daily lives.

Tova Meiner needs no alarm clock. She wakes on her own each morning at 2 or 3. She pads over to the computer to instant-message her children in Israel, catching up on news from home and, above all, making sure her babies are safe.

They are not really babies, of course. Shiri, her older daughter, is 24 and in school, studying computer programming. Yaron is 22. And Talya is 21 and studying for the university entrance exam.

Tova Meiner, 49, came to Cary last August with her younger son, 16-year-old Shlomi, and Meir, 50. Meir is spending 2 1/2 years working on an information management project with Nortel in Research Triangle Park. Tova is on something of a vacation from her job administering social and educational programs for Russian, Ethiopian and other immigrants in Hadera.

With suicide bombers a constant threat in Israel, Tova Meiner worries for her children's safety.

Meir Meiner said Sunday that he was on the Internet with his daughters when they heard ambulances rushing by their house.

"Ambulances to Netanya go also from Hadera," he said. Later, the family members found out about the latest attack, in Netanya.

The last suicide bombing before Sunday's, in a pool hall outside Tel Aviv, killed 16 and wounded at least 60 on May 7. As soon as they heard of the attack, their two daughters called.

"It's kind of a routine," Tova Meiner said, her English thickly flavored with the inflections of her first language, Hebrew. "They know that I am worrying, so they prevent heart pains."

A closing circle

Still, each new attack brings fresh fear.

"You know, you feel that the circle of death and terror is coming closer and closer and closer to you," Tova Meiner said. "It's because you know people that were wounded and were killed. Dead people. You know them. And you get this information here in Cary. It's hell. You can't imagine."

Just the other week, it was a lifelong friend of her son, Yaron. Shot in the head on patrol in Jenin. The Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin was the scene of the bloodiest fighting of the recent Israeli incursion in the West Bank.

Before that, it was her sister-in-law's cousin and his daughter, killed in a suicide bombing in a restaurant in Haifa during Passover. The man's 25-year-old wife was badly injured and now uses a wheelchair.

Before that, it was two young women, friends of her daughters. One died and the other lost her legs, victims of a car bombing about a quarter mile from the Meiner family home in the center of the small city of Hadera.

"We could hear the sound of the ambulances, the police," she said. "Even now, the sound of ambulances is awful to me. If I sit here and hear an ambulance on Cary Parkway, it's awful."

Ordinary lives

Despite the bloodshed and sorrow, Israelis are a tough breed, Meiner said. When your country is on a continual war footing, she explained, you learn to find joy and fulfillment in the routine of life.

For the Meiner children living in Israel the danger may be closer at hand, but the worry seems farther away.

A couple of days after Yaron Meiner returned from the base last weekend, he, Shiri and Talya gathered for their regular weekend lunch at the historic hilltop village of Zikhron Ya'acov. They sipped iced coffee, talked of the previous night's adventures, and passed Yaron's cell phone between them with their father on the other end.

It was Saturday, the busiest day of the week in tony downtown Zikhron, and outside the coffee shop an armed guard in a clean white shirt and mirrored sunglasses watched as young people, families and couples walked past on the promenade.

The presence of the guard "is very unusual," Shiri said. "It is just because of the last events."

As Yaron chatted with his father about the army, Shiri described a wedding she and Talya had attended the night before. It was in a friend's back yard in Zikhron, overlooking a patchwork of agricultural fields and fish ponds framed by the Mediterranean Sea in the distance.

"It was nice, a beautiful view," Shiri said.

"There was security," Talya added, "but they didn't go through your things."

In some ways, the Meiner children are similar to young adults of the same age in the Triangle. Yaron and Shiri have tattoos they have tried to hide from their parents, and Talya's nostril is pierced. They enjoy the beach and loud music.

But in other ways they are different. All three have served in the military, which is mandatory for men and women after high school. Shiri was an air-traffic controller for the air force. Talya worked ground radar in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. And Yaron is a communications specialist.

As Talya took the phone and told her father about her studies, Yaron described a hard-rock dance club he favors in Tel Aviv, where he hung out with some friends until 5 that morning. There were guards in the parking lot, on the street and inside the club, he said.

"Each time they check -- the car, in the street and when you enter the club they check you again," Yaron said. "You don't think about it, but we always say 'Shalom' [hello] so they see [and hear] that we are Jewish Israelis."

After each of the children spoke to their father, they made plans to go to a comedy show at the Hadera High School. E-mail and cell phone are two of the ways they stay in close touch with their parents and younger brother. They also use teleconferences and even video-conferences through their computers.

Staying in touch is important to Meir Meiner, whose job keeps him on the go. One day he will be in New York, the next in India on business.

"We're controlling every movement of theirs," Meir Meiner said recently after getting off the phone at the house in Cary. "The last phone call you heard was my daughter saying she's leaving work and going home. She'll call when she gets home. We know when she goes to and from, and we know when she comes back."

Since settling in Cary, Tova Meiner has been back to Israel twice, once during Christmas and again during Passover.

The Passover visit was dreadful. A bomb blast in a Netanya hotel killed 25 people gathered for Passover Seder. Then 15 more died in the bombing of a cafe in Haifa. The Meiners have family in and around Haifa, and the restaurant is one of their favorites.

Afraid, as was all of Israel, Meiner spent a week inside her family's five-bedroom house in the center of town. Then she ventured out, finding the streets, stores and restaurants empty. Gradually, life returned to something approaching normal.

"You go out into a frontier land, into the front of the war," she said. "You do your shopping and everything regularly, but with an awful fear. You're looking at every person. If he is fat, maybe he has a belt of bombs. And maybe somebody will shoot you in the streets."

Violence and fear

Arik Shorer, director of Hadera's department of social welfare and a friend of Tova Meiner, said Israeli society has recovered from all its wars and will rebound also from the recent attacks.

"September 11 to the Americans -- it's a shock," Shorer said. "Why? Because it never happened before and it was very big. We have dealt with it [before]. And we have systems to deal with it."

For the Meiner children, the attacks felt as though they had hit all around the family home.

Yaron pointed to his high school yearbook and a picture of his friend, Nir Kritchman, the naval commando who was killed in action in Jenin. Shiri talked about Shoshana Reece, her classmate who was killed in an explosion.

"There's fear," said Talya, who was dressed casually in orange sweat pants, a blue shirt and sandals. She looked as if she was still trekking in New Zealand, where she traveled for several months after finishing her stint in the army. "It was different in Lebanon. Rockets fell on us and I wasn't as scared. But I'm not going to go around carrying a gun."