Iran missile strikes: Father's anger exposes divide in Israeli society

"I am so angry," says Kasem Abu al-Hija, 67.On Saturday, four of his family members were killed when an Iranian missile struck their home in northern Israel, collapsing the concrete building on top of them.Books, clothes, children's toys and body parts were blown into the road, witnesses say.The whole street was plunged into darkness when the missile hit. Rescuers managed to locate their bodies by following trails of blood.The four victims were named as Kasem's daughter Manar Khatib, 45, his two granddaughters, Shada, 20 and Hala, 13, and their aunt, Manal Khatib, 41.They had managed to make it to the two reinforced safe rooms in the house that they shared - but the ballistic missile hit it directly.They lived in Tamra, an Arab-majority town in northern Israel. Minutes after their deaths, a video emerged online. It showed the Iranian missiles streaking through the sky overhead. As they descend on Tamra, a voice can be heard shouting, in Hebrew: "On the village, on the village.""May your village burn," a group of others then say, singing, whooping and clapping.
"They sang about what happened to my family," says Kasem, softly, surrounded by relatives at a vigil.The video - which shows Israelis singing a common anti-Arab chant often sung by ultranationalist Jews - has been widely condemned in Israel, with President Isaac Herzog calling it "appalling and disgraceful".But there are more reasons that Kasem and the wider community in Tamra are angry about what happened.Here - as is the case with many Arab-majority communities in Israel - there are no public bomb shelters for its 38,000 residents.For comparison, the nearby Jewish-majority town Karmiel, population 55,000, has 126 public shelters.Residents of Tamra have long raised the alarm over the disparity. Situated in Israel's north, about 10km (6 miles) east of the city of Haifa and 25km (16 miles) south of the border with Lebanon, the town has been vulnerable to rockets fired by the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah. In October 2024, a rocket fired by the group seriously injured one woman. Across Israel, about a quarter of the population have no access to a proper shelter. But in non-Jewish local authorities the figure is almost half, according to a 2018 report by Israel's State Comptroller, the most recent data available. "For many decades, Arab local authorities have received lower state funding across various areas, including emergency preparedness," says Lital Piller of the Israel Democracy Institute, a think tank.Where shelters do exist, she says, "they are few, poorly maintained, and often not suited for prolonged stays".The BBC has approached Israel's Ministry of Defense for comment. Israeli Arabs - many of whom prefer to be called Palestinian citizens of Israel - make up a fifth of the country's population. By law, they have equal rights with Jewish citizens, but they routinely complain of state discrimination and being treated as second-class citizens. Following the Gulf War of 1990-91, when Iraqi missiles hit Tel Aviv and Haifa, the Israeli government mandated that all new residential buildings must contain a reinforced safe room, or Mamad, as they are known.
But Arab communities often face tough planning restrictions, which leads to unregulated construction and homes being built without them, activists say.About 40% of Tamra's homes have their own safe room, local authorities say, leaving the majority of residents having to run to neighbours' homes to share. In many cases, due to the short warning period, this is not possible."The gaps are enormous," says Ilan Amit, of the Arab-Jewish Center for Empowerment, Equality, and Cooperation (Ajeec), which works to build shelters in Arab communities. "I live in Jerusalem. Every building has a bomb shelter. Every neighbourhood has a public bomb shelter."As dark falls in Tamra, residents' phones light up simultaneously with a screeching alert: "You must stay near a protected area."Sirens soon follow, and residents - fresh from the trauma of Saturday's strike - panic. Mothers gather their children and people run up the street shouting. Several families cram into the safe room of one house. Some cry, some smile, others twitch nervously. One man closes his eyes and prays. Boom after boom is heard overhead.The shelter issue is even more pronounced in Israel's Arab bedouin communities - many of which live in villages in the Negev Desert that are not recognised by the Israeli government, so do not have shelters built for them. The only victim of the April 2024 escalation in hostilities between Israel and Iran was a young girl from one such community who was seriously injured and spent a year in hospital after fragments from an Iranian missile struck her head.Lack of shelters is also a prevalent issue in some of Israel's poorer Jewish communities in areas like the south of Tel Aviv.
A new survey conducted by Hebrew University found that 82.7% of Jewish Israelis support the attack on Iran - but 67.9% of Arab Israelis oppose it. Further to that, 69.2% of Arab Israelis reported feelings of fear over the strikes - with 25.1% expressing despair."Arab society feels neglected and left behind," says Amit. "There are huge gaps in education and employment. There are huge gaps in shelters, in the existence of shelters."Adel Khatib, a municipal official from Tamra, says: "In the days since this happened, you can feel the anger.""We don't get the basic needs," says Khatib. "Most of the Arab communities, they don't have community centres or buildings for culture, activities."According to official Israeli statistics, in 2023, 42.4% of the Arab population lived below the poverty line - more than double the proportion in Israel's general population.There have been attempts in recent years to close these gaps. In 2021, Israel's previous government brought in a five-year development plan for Arab society. "We were in the middle of a huge leap in social economic development, narrowing gaps in education, higher education, and employment," says Amit.But Israel's current right-wing governing coalition, the most hardline in its history, has slowly reduced funding for that plan - redirecting the money elsewhere.Some of these cuts came as the government adjusted budgets to fight the ongoing war in Gaza, which began in response to the Hamas-led cross-border attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.
"This government has been simply putting, you know, sticks in the wheels of this five-year plan, not making it possible to implement broad parts of it," Amit adds."For the past year and a half, Arab society found itself between a rock and a hard place in the sense that on one hand, they're suffering from the policies of the current government, and on the other hand, they're seeing their brothers and sisters in Gaza and in the West Bank suffering because of the war," he says. Outside the ruins of the family home, Mohamed Osman, 16, a neighbour, says: "Everyone is angry and sad."Speaking of Shada, 20, he says: "She studied her entire life. She wanted to be the best. Her father is a lawyer, and she wanted to be like him. All of those dreams, just disappeared."They were the best picture of a happy family…When I imagine them, I imagine the pieces of them that I saw."At a vigil ahead of the funeral, dozens of community members gather, greeting one another with handshakes, sharing coffee and tea, and mourning quietly."The bombs do not choose between Arabs or Jews," says Kasem. "We must end this war. We must end it now."Photographs by Tom Bennett

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It remains unclear who is behind the operation, though four of the experts believed it was likely to be the Iranian government while the fifth saw Israel as more likely. The messages are deeply eerie and disconcerting for Iranians in the diaspora struggling to contact their families as Israel's offensive targeting Iranian nuclear and military sites pounds Tehran and other cities. Iran has retaliated with hundreds of missiles and drones, and the government has imposed a widespread internet blackout it says is to protect the country. That has blocked average Iranians from getting information from the outside world, and their relatives from being able to reach them. 'I don't know why they're doing this,' said Ellie, whose mother is diabetic, low on insulin and trapped on the outskirts of Tehran. She wants her mother to evacuate the city but cannot communicate that to her. A request for comment sent to the Iranian mission to the U.N. was not immediately answered. Most of the voices speak in English, though at least one spoke Farsi. If the caller tries to talk to it, the voice just continues with its message. A 30-year-old women living in New York, who heard the same message Ellie did, called it 'psychological warfare.' 'Calling your mom and expecting to hear her voice and hearing an AI voice is one of the most scary things I've ever experienced,' she said. 'I can feel it in my body.' And the messages can be bizarre. One woman living in the U.K. desperately called her mom and instead got a voice offering platitudes. 'Thank you for taking the time to listen,' it said, in a recording that she shared with the AP. 'Today, I'd like to share some thoughts with you and share a few things that might resonate in our daily lives. Life is full of unexpected surprises, and these surprises can sometimes bring joy while at other times they challenge us.' Not all Iranians abroad encounter the robotic voice. Some said when they try to call family, the phone just rings and rings. Colin Crowell, a former vice president for Twitter's global policy, said it appeared that Iranian phone companies were diverting the calls to a default message system that does not allow calls to be completed. Amir Rashidi, an Iranian cybersecurity expert based in the U.S., agreed and said the recordings appeared to be a government measure to thwart hackers, though there was no hard evidence. He said that in the first two days of Israel's campaign, mass voice and text messages were sent to Iranian phones urging the public to gear up for 'emergency conditions.' They aimed to spread panic — similar to mass calls that government opponents made into Iran during the war with Iraq in the 1980s. The voice messages trying to calm people 'fit the pattern of the Iranian government and how in the past it handled emergency situations,' said Rashidi, the director of Texas-based Miaan, a group that reports on digital rights in the Middle East. Mobile phones and landlines ultimately are overseen by Iran's Ministry of Information and Communications Technology. But the country's intelligence services have long been believed to be monitoring conversations. 'It would be hard for anybody else to hack. Of course, it is possible it is Israeli. But I don't think they have an incentive to do this,' said Mehdi Yahyanejad, a tech entrepreneur and internet freedom activist. Marwa Fatafta, Berlin-based policy and advocacy director for digital rights group Access Now, suggested it could be 'a form of psychological warfare by the Israelis.' She said it fits a past pattern by Israel of using extensive direct messaging to Lebanese and Palestinians during campaigns in Gaza and against Hezbollah. 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Israel's assault on Iran, including its nuclear and ballistic weapons programme, is unlikely to secure its long-term strategic objectives, even if Benjamin Netanyahu manages to persuade the Trump administration into joining the conflict in the coming days and weeks, experts have said. According to diplomats, military specialists and security analysts, Israel – and its prime minister – is likely to face mounting headwinds in the campaign, amid warnings that it risks dangerously destabilising the region. There is mounting scepticism over whether even the US's use of massive ground-penetrating bombs would be able to knock out Iran's Fordow nuclear facility, which is buried deep beneath a mountain, and questions have emerged about Israel's ability to sustain a long-range offensive that has exposed its cities to counterattack by ballistic missiles. Experts make the distinction between Israel's operational success in targeting key Iranian sites and individuals, and its strategic objectives which appear to have expanded to regime change in Tehran, on top of destroying its nuclear programme. 'There is a dominant trend in Israel going back to the formation of the state that has suggested to politicians that violence will deliver a solution to what are political problems,' said Toby Dodge, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. 'My gut feeling is Iranian regime is more stable than has been suggested. And because Iran has a long history of commitment to technological modernisation and proliferation, well, that's something you can't simply remove with a bomb.' Analysts are also puzzled by an Israeli strategy that appears to have gambled on triggering a conflict in the hope of pushing a highly erratic US president in Donald Trump to join, supplying the firepower that Israel lacks in terms of massive bunker-busting bombs. Experts assess that the US would probably have to use several of these bombs, which would need to be dropped relatively close to the Fordow plant, protected by up to 90 metres of bedrock, in a complex and risky operation that is not guaranteed to succeed, and would probably draw retaliation from Iran against US bases, risking further escalation. 'Subcontracting the Fordow job would put the United States in Iran's sights,' Daniel C Kurtzer, a former US ambassador to Israel, and Steven N Simon, a veteran of the national security council, wrote in Foreign Affairs this week. 'Iran would almost certainly retaliate by killing American civilians. That, in turn, would compel the United States to reciprocate. 'Soon enough the only targets left for Washington to hit would be the Iranian regime's leaders, and the United States would again go into the regime-change business – a business in which exceedingly few Americans want to be involved any longer.' The prospect of regime change, perhaps by killing Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which has been raised by Israeli officials (and reportedly vetoed by Trump) is already causing profound alarm in the region. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the senior Iraqi cleric, made a rare intervention, warning of the profound dangers to the region. Another sceptic is Andreas Krieg, an associate professor in the Department of Defence Studies at King's College London, who has worked widely in the Middle East and is doubtful that air power can alone can make the kind of impact being sought by Israel, both in terms of destroying Iran's nuclear knowhow or removing the clerical regime. 'It's not the holy grail. We'd learned the lesson that air power alone doesn't work. And then we learned in Iraq and Afghanistan that even massive numbers of boots on ground doesn't work,' he said. 'What we're seeing is not a strategic approach but one that is operational using air power, and the operational approach is starting the consume the strategic one which is about the political endgame. 'The best Israel can best can hope for is something like the campaign against Hezbollah, which has probably delivered a short-lived success, in that it was very successful in degrading Hezbollah's network. 'Iran is very similar in that its defence strategy is built around a decentralised mosaic. Decapitation doesn't work against that kind of network. You can take out key nodes, but the best [Israel] can hope for in killing Khamenei would be to trigger the succession crisis which in any case had been anticipated.' And if Netanyahu has miscalculated, it is in an area where he has long claimed expertise: in reading and playing US politics. With American support for US intervention polling dismally, and the issue threatening to split Trump's Maga movement, Israel may find itself on the wrong side of a toxic argument that has far more salience for Trump than helping Netanyahu. Failing a US intervention to support Israel's campaign, Israel is likely to face growing challenges amid indications it is running low on some missile interceptors. Crew fatigue for the long-range sorties, aircraft maintenance cycles and the exhaustion of prepared target lists are all likely to militate against Israel's ability to maintain a prolonged conflict at the current high level of intensity. Any drop-off will be used by Tehran to suggest to Iranians that it has weathered the worst of the storm. There is a third possibility. 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Reuters

40 minutes ago

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Cyprus arrests individual on suspicion of terror-related plot, police say

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