BAT YAM, Israel—Dazed, shaken but determined, a seaside Tel Aviv suburb awoke on Sunday to a tableau of death and destruction after an Iranian missile slammed into an apartment building overnight, turning a residential street into a warzone.
At least seven people were killed, including an 8-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy, and scores were injured in the 2:45 a.m. attack, with two others still unaccounted for as of the late afternoon, in the most lethal Iranian attack on Israel in the current war. (Four others were killed, including a mother and two daughters, in a separate barrage of missiles on the Israeli-Arab town of Tamra in the Galilee.)
“We were in the bomb shelter as soon as we got an alert on our phone, and then we heard a tremendous explosion that sent the door flying,” Snezhana Yaacovlev, 36, told JNS. “There was total darkness; we couldn’t see anything, and when we got out, there was dust all around and the smell of burning. We were all in shock.”
Her building was gutted.
The apartments in the nondescript building, just opposite the taller eight-story building that was directly hit by the missile, were demolished and had been cordoned off by security officials assessing damage.
At its entrance, blown-out windows and shards of glass littered the courtyard as a stray cat meandered about. Inside the apartments, the destruction was everywhere: countertops littered with glass, dust and debris, blood stains on the floor, a TV half hanging on the wall and overturned furniture strewn throughout a two-bedroom flat.
One front door, ajar and plastered with a yellow sign reading “The Emunah family,” opened into an apocalyptic scene of window frames and tiles strewn on the dust-covered sofas, looking out into a windowless abyss of devastation.
Yaacovlev, who was in the shelter with her husband, Sergei, and their 11-year-old daughter, escaped unscathed. She later found their cat hiding under a bed in their demolished flat. At midday, they were waiting outside on Jerusalem Street to be sent to a hotel for temporary accommodations.
Outside, a security team worked to clear the rubble as residents of this working-class city of 165,000 just south of Tel Aviv looked on in shock and tried to comfort one another.
Bat Yam Mayor Tzvika Brot said on Sunday that those who died in the attack were not in the building’s bomb shelter. More than 60 buildings were damaged, including six that will have to be demolished, he stated.
Through it all, some residents went about their business on Sunday morning, cleaning up the debris from their storefronts or shopping for food as the Israeli work week began.
“She was really scared; she knew we were at war,” said Feebie Elgrabisi, 67, clutching her 6-year-old Pinscher as the duo waited for the bus after shopping, expressing her thanks to the heavens that her home was spared damage. “So she stays close to me.”
“We survived Saddam’s missiles in 1990; we will survive this,” offered Gavriel Babayev, 45, whose barber shop was damaged in the attack. “The main thing is that we are OK. The people of Israel live.”
