When the first wave of Israel Air Force (IAF) jets returned home from the opening salvos of Operation Rising Lion last Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the home front that the consequences of this pre-emptive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be severe and costly. So far, he’s been right. Over the past seven days, Iran’s retaliatory missile barrages have inflicted significant damage and death on Israel’s civilian population. (RELATED: Israeli Air Strikes and Iranian Missile Barrages Are Far From Over )
The Iranian missile barrages typically consist of 50 to 100 hypersonic ballistic missiles, some with 1.5-ton warheads, and often occur around 4 a.m., 7 a.m., and 11 p.m. They reach Israel in a predictable south-to-north pattern, arriving first in the upper Negev regions between Dimona, where Israel’s ambiguous nuclear facility is located, and Beer Sheva, then blanket the densely populated center between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, before ending in Haifa and the upper Galilee.
The Israeli Home Front Command’s recently updated early warning cell phone notifications alert the population roughly 10 to 15 minutes — about the time it takes for the missiles to travel over 1,000 miles from western Iran to Israel — before Israel’s airspace is infiltrated. This is a significant improvement from last year, when Iran’s two missile assaults on Israel in April and October caught most of the country by surprise.
The early warnings also allow sufficient time to seek adequate shelter. Last fall, when residents in Haifa and across northern Israel could set their watches according to Hezbollah’s daily rocket barrages, the interior stairwells of buildings and designated bomb shelters provided sufficient cover from the scant Katyusha and Fadi rockets that slipped past Israel’s Iron Dome. (RELATED: Basic Thoughts on Iran)
Now, things are different. Iran’s Sejil and Kheibar ballistic missiles that have evaded Israel’ air defense systems in recent days, destroying entire neighborhood blocks and ripping through residential high-rises in Bat Yam, Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Rehovot, Petah Tikvah, Bnei Brak, Jerusalem, Beer Sheva, and Haifa, have convinced many to seek more durable means of shelter. Residents in Tel Aviv and Haifa — the two cities with underground urban transit lines — now flock to the city’s underground train stations for shelter.
At 4:10 AM, Monday morning, I woke to the shrill sound of Tel Aviv’s early warning alert on my phone, knowing it was only a matter of minutes before northern Israel was put on high alert. Gliding down the four flights of stairs in my stone-clad Haifa apartment, I forwent the building’s built-in bomb shelter and sprinted half a block down the street where a crowd had already formed at the entrance to the city’s underground Carmelit train station.
As a single-line underground funicular, the Carmelit connects the city’s seaport and downtown shopping and nightlife districts with the residential centers on Mount Carmel.
When local sirens activated with the first orange streaks of interceptors rising to meet Iran’s incoming missiles, the milling crowd outside the Carmelit station descended into the underbelly of the city.
Mothers unpacked games and picture books to distract their children, old men turned up their phone radios to annoyingly loud volumes, and couples unrolled blankets and fished out water bottles prepositioned in the station’s fire hose boxes. A grumpy station attendant walked around and scolded families for not properly leashing and muzzling their pet dogs.
Watching this scene unfold in Haifa’s colorfully tiled underground terminals made me ponder what it must have been like in the London Underground during the German Blitz from 1940 to 41.
Fifteen minutes and numerous loud overhead “booms” later, we ascended to find a city uncannily quiet in the early dawn hours. Like everyone else, I whipped out my phone to check in with friends and family across the country.
“In the 38 years I’ve lived here, rocket attacks have never scared me, even during the second Lebanon [war],” Tali, a local social worker, told me as we relished the fresh morning air outside the station. “In the past, I never even left my apartment when the sirens go off. But now I’m scared.”
Fear, resilience, excitement, and action — qualifiers of the Chutzpah mosaic — permeate the Israeli air.
While most barrages are intercepted by Israel’s multi-tiered air defenses — consisting of IAF jets, surface-to-air and atmospheric interceptors, and two U.S. THAAD batteries — the system is by no means hermetic. Twenty-four civilians have died from missile strikes since the weekend, with over 600 injured and around 2,000 made homeless from demolished homes.
Monday morning’s attack incurred one of the country’s highest civilian death tolls in recent months. A ballistic missile struck Haifa’s Bazan oil refinery, killing three workers, with a second strike in the residential neighborhood of Neve Sha’anan causing significant damage but no deaths. As the third-largest city, Haifa is Israel’s economic heartbeat and home to the country’s primary commercial seaport, naval base, and petroleum facilities, thus making it a prime target for Hezbollah rockets, Houthis, and Iranian missiles.
I visited Neve Sha’anan later that morning with a friend to inspect a rental unit they owned on the top floor of one of the damaged apartment blocks. The street was littered with shattered blue glass, charred car bodies, and flanked by buildings with collapsed balconies and blown-out windows. The building closest to the impact was missing an entire exterior wall. It was a surreal scene from an apocalyptic movie, if not for the chaos and scrambling of pedestrian spectators, police, Magen David Adom medical personnel, and other officials clad in fluorescent vests.
Two missiles also landed in downtown Tel Aviv on Monday morning, striking near the U.S. embassy branch and the popular downtown Shuk HaCarmel market, blowing out storefront facades and scattering debris from destroyed buildings across several city blocks. In the same barrage, a missile hit a school in the nearby ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak, killing one person. Another missile hit a high-rise residential tower in Petah Tikvah, killing four people and reducing half the building to craggy heaps of concrete and twisted iron bars.
Residents in Tel Aviv are also taking advantage of the new underground stations along the city’s mass transit, Dankal Metro, or “Red Line.”
“We’ve turned the stations into villages,” Marina, a 32-year-old refugee from the Ukraine-Russian war and recent immigrant to Tel Aviv, told me. “Some people even bring camping tents and [sleeping] bags … I won’t be surprised when people start bringing [portable] barbeques.”
Missile impacts in the greater Tel Aviv metropolitan area carry symbolic weight alongside the psychological trauma inflicted on the densely populated area. Historically, the first “all-Jewish city,” Tel Aviv, today is a global hi-tech hub with a vibrant cultural, arts, and culinary scene. The city stands as a beacon of Jewish permanence in the region, not to mention embodiments of economic success, and cultural and social tolerance — the very beacon that the Ayatollah’s regime wants to snuff out.
“Something inside me died when I walked home [from the underground station] and saw the city that I love in shambles, glass and concrete everywhere, buildings ruined, the restaurant where I sat yesterday, just yesterday, no longer there,” a friend from Tel Aviv told me over the phone on Monday morning.
According to Reuters, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) boasted a new method of assault that caused Israel’s air defense systems and interceptors to target each other, allowing enemy missiles to slip through.
On Thursday morning, June 19, the barrage pattern had broken, and Israel was allowed to sleep past 4 a.m. Perhaps threats from U.S. President Donald Trump and speculation of U.S. bombers and bunker buster bombs joining the conflict caused Tehran to think again. Or, perhaps the over 1,000 strategic military and missile targets destroyed by IAF jets in western Iran the previous day had broken the Iranian spirit.
By 7 a.m., however, early warnings and sirens erupted across Israel with incoming missiles. By 7:15, three missiles had hit central Israel, striking an apartment complex and school, with a fourth missile landing on the Soroka Medical Center in Beer Sheva, one of the country’s largest hospitals. Despite massive destruction, no deaths have been reported at this point.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz speaks for the country in calling this intentional targeting of civilian and healthcare infrastructure a war crime of the most serious kind. While the nation and the world hold their breath to hear President Trump’s final decision on U.S. military involvement in the region, Netanyahu, speaking outside the ruined hospital on Thursday afternoon, put all retaliatory options on the table, including a strike on Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. “No one is immune,” the premier said. “All the options are open.”
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