19 hours ago
‘Oh my God, what's going on?' Miami visitors stranded as missiles target Israel
Dahlia Bendavid is no stranger to the sound of sirens.
The Aventura woman has spent the last three years raising millions in emergency funding for Israel and visiting several times after the Hamas terrorist attack as director of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation's overseas department.
Still, the shrill alarm that echoed on Friday morning as Israel announced airstrikes on neighboring Iran gave her that familiar feeling.
'I'm telling you, like, jumping out of bed, 'Oh my God, what's going on?' because you're all discombobulated,' she said, describing the moments before she and and a friend ran into a bomb shelter to wait out the expected barrage signaled by the sirens.
Bendavid is one of several Miamians caught in the conflict that started Friday following Israel's targeted attack on Iran's nuclear facilities and military chain of command. Paul Kruss, an Aventura city commissioner visiting family in Israel, also took cover in a bomb shelter as sirens went off.
Friday night saw counter strikes from Iran, with missiles hitting at least seven sites near Tel Aviv, and Saturday saw Israeli missiles flying over Tehran in the morning with a retaliatory attack by Iran in the evening.
The death toll is estimated to be 78 in Iran, including four top security chiefs, according to the country's U.N. ambassador, while three casualties have been confirmed in Israel as reported by the Associated Press.
The attacks, launched over Israel's concerns about Iran's growing nuclear program, happened days shy of a U.S.-Iran meeting where both countries planned to discuss curbing the program in exchange for the U.S. lifting its sanctions.
Bendavid, 58, arrived in Israel on May 30, two weeks before the missiles started flying, for a routine visit to Israeli organizations that her nonprofit funds. On Thursday, the day before the first strike by Israel, she attended a computer coding hackathon for Orthodox Jewish women studying technology.
Though the attacks marked a stark escalation in a decades-long conflict, Bendavid says daily life in Israel is not much different than 'preparing for a hurricane' in South Florida.
She describes the same unease and uncertainty about where a storm might land to where a missile might hit in Modi'in-Maccabim-Re'ut, the central-Israel city she's staying in halfway between metropolises Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Schools and workplaces are closed and national events like the week-long Tel Aviv Pride parade have been canceled. Grocery shelves are wiped clean of essentials like milk and eggs as residents stock up their 'safe rooms,' small-scale shelters set up in homes or apartment complexes.
Alerts from the Home Front Command app wake locals from restless sleeps, often giving a three-minute window to enter the nearest 'protected space' before the next attack is expected.
The sirens, she says, go off 'in the middle of the night. The other day it was at 3 in the morning. Last night it was at 1 in the morning. You're not sleeping because of the stress and the anxiety.'
For others, safety has proven even harder to come by, Bendavid said.
Her 29-year-old son Ariel, who moved to Tel Aviv a year and a half ago, is one of many Israeli residents who live in outdated buildings with no bomb shelters. He sleeps in his clothes because when alarms sound, he has about a minute to bolt across the street to an underground parking garage.
Neighbors of Bendavid's have woken up to shrapnel in their backyards and have been urged by locals to not post photos of the debris on social media or share them via messaging apps for fear that the Iranian government will have more information on its targets.
Vacationers from South Florida and study-abroad students from schools including the University of Miami and Florida International University found themselves stranded in highly targeted cities Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Israeli media predicted airport shutdowns for the next three to four days and some U.S. airlines have halted flights through the summer. Benadvid isn't sure if her flight back home, scheduled for Tuesday morning, will take off.
Israel is in a state of trauma and shock, she said, even though morale remains high.
'I've been getting a lot of texts asking 'Are you OK?' ... Like, how would you be in the middle of a war?' she said. 'But at the same time, I trust the army to defend us. They're doing an amazing job, the people are optimistic. We have hope.'
