‘This is not our first rodeo': Israelis remain stoic amid Iran strikes

The Guardian

16-06-2025

The Iranian missile blew the door off the White City museum celebrating Bauhaus Tel Aviv, and shattered the windows of the Quick coffee shop down the road, where cinnamon buns and salads sat in the display case ready for a relaxed summer day that would never come.
In the ultra-orthodox neighbourhood of Bnei Bark another missile collapsed a school, killing an 80-year-old man. A third hit partway up a high-rise tower in manicured, suburban Petah Tikva, destroying a reinforced safe room and killing the family inside.
Destruction landed randomly across Israel's biggest metropolitan area on Sunday, the third night of Iranian missile attacks, crossing social, economic and religious divides to kill eight people, injure more than 100 and leave many more homeless.
After Israel launched the war with attacks on Iranian military commanders and the assassinations of top nuclear scientists early on Friday morning, Iran vowed revenge.
Since then more than 20 missiles have evaded sophisticated defences to cause devastation unprecedented in contemporary Israel. While some appear to have targeted strategic sites, many have landed in residential areas far from known military installations.
They have brought down apartment blocks and a school, and damaged synagogues, museums, shops and cafes. Entire buildings have collapsed at the worst-hit sites, with severe damage over a radius of hundreds of metres.
'I'm so tired, now I just want to leave,' said Avital, 72, on Monday morning. She was sitting outside the tower in Petah Tikva that had been home for more than a decade, waiting for rescue workers to bring down her clothes and medicine from their 14th storey apartment.
'My husband wanted to go out for a bit on Sunday, but I said: 'No, let's stay here where its safe.' Well, what kind of safety was that?' Their home looks out on the strike site, a gaping hole in the neighbouring block, where four people were killed.
Avital is now moving to a hotel to wait for news on whether their building can be repaired, and hopes that the war will end soon. 'This is our country; we don't have anywhere else to go'.
At the start of the war, the government urged people to shelter in communal shelters or individual safe rooms – a legal requirement in all new builds in recent years – when the air raid sirens sound.
A sophisticated multi-layer warning system puts Israelis on notice to stay by a 'protected area' when imminent attacks are expected, and usually gives an early alert 10 minutes or more before the missile is expected to land.
But in Petah Tikva, one safe room was taken out by a direct hit, leaving the government scrambling to reassure people that this was extremely rare, fearing they might shift to sheltering in basements or stairwells instead.
Those leave people vulnerable in other ways. Some have been killed by collapsing buildings, blast waves from the explosion, or smoke inhalation from fires sparked by the impact.
A quarter of Israelis do not have the option of safe rooms, state ombudsman Matanyahu Englman admitted on a visit to Bat Yam, where another missile took down part of a high rise, and left buildings unsafe for several blocks around.
'This is quite a large proportion of the population,' he said. 'We have found some deficiencies and raised recommendation for the government to do more. Beside fighting enemies outside the country we have to take care of civilians.
The area hit in central Tel Aviv is one of them, a district mostly made up of historic low-rise buildings from the 1930s. Few have safe rooms.
Liad Scharf, 48, was sheltering in his basement when the missile hit, sending chunks of plaster showering down, and cracks through the walls of his bedroom upstairs.
He is worried that the war will stop his daughters coming to visit over the summer, but the damage at home is 'just money'.
The apartment can be patched up, said Scharf, who backs the government's decision to attack Iran, despite the heavy personal and national price. Israel has endured multiple wars, and is surrounded by enemies who will destroy it if the country doesn't fight, he said.
'This is not our first rodeo. Or our second, or our third or our fourth,' he said. 'We are strong, and we have to do what's necessary.'
Death tolls in both Tehran and Israel are likely to mount. Military officials have admitted that the scale of Iran's nightly barrages, with dozens of missiles sent in multiple waves, means that even its sophisticated air defence systems cannot stop all the warheads.
At the start of the war Israel estimated Iran had about 2,000 missiles. Many have been destroyed, and nearly 300 fired at Israel, but it is still thought to have an arsenal on a scale that dwarfs previous threats to the country.
Rockets from Hezbollah or Hamas are mostly blocked by the Iron Dome defence system and the few that do land cannot rip apart whole blocks. Yemen's Houthis and Iraq, in the years under dictator Saddam Hussein, have also fired ballistic missiles at Israel, but they each deployed a few dozen warheads in total.
Analysts also warn that Israel's stockpiles of expensive air defence missiles are not unlimited, and while inventories are a closely guarded military secret, if they are depleted too fast it could make the country even more vulnerable.
There is also likely to be economic pain from the war. The economy is partially shut down, with large gatherings of people banned, many businesses closed, and all flights cancelled, making it hard to enter or leave the country.
But for now a large portion of the country see the losses of lives, homes, earnings and much else, as a painful but necessary sacrifice for the country's future.
'The diplomatic solutions were not working out,' said real estate agent Ofek, 24, who had come to check on his grandfather, who lives just a couple of blocks from the Bat Yam site. 'I guess this is the price we have to pay to be safe.'