Missiles hit hospitals, homes and families: Inside Israel's terrifying Iranian bombardment
CENTRAL ISRAEL - At least six people were seriously wounded Thursday morning when an Iranian ballistic missile struck Be'ersheba's Soroka Medical Center, part of a broader barrage that also scored direct hits on Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, and Holon.
"We are hitting nuclear targets and missile targets precisely, and they are hitting the pediatric ward of the hospital. That says it all," said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while surveying the damage at the hospital.
The attacks on Israel have left many homeless and lucky to be alive. Ariel Levin-Waldman is one such person. He was at his in-laws' home in Rishon LeZion, where he and his family had been staying for several months during renovations to their own house—when an Iranian missile struck the residential neighborhood. The attack killed two people and injured dozens; a third victim died during an earlier wave of Iranian strikes.
"At around 5 a.m., I got the same missile alert everyone in the country gets," Levin-Waldman told Fox News Digital. "I grabbed my phone, ran downstairs with my wife and kids, and we made it to the shelter. My mother-in-law joined us."
Then the missile hit the building.
"There was a flash of light, and everything went dark. We were choking, struggling to breathe," Levin-Waldman said. Realizing help might not arrive in time, he continued, "I couldn't wait to be rescued. We were suffocating, and I was afraid we'd be buried alive."
Levin-Waldman tried to survey the damage inside the shelter, but the thick cloud of dust made it nearly impossible to see. All he could make out was that his arms and legs were still intact. The floor had become uneven, and the walls were damaged from the force of the blast.
It was at that moment he realized the explosion had propelled a book cabinet across the shelter, hitting his mother-in-law in the head.
"She was bleeding heavily, and I realized she had been calling out 'save us' in Hebrew, but her voice was faint," he recalled. "I managed to lift the cabinet off my mother-in-law, and when I did, I saw a potential escape route. I cleared the way so my wife, Tali, and our two-and-a-half-year-old, Renana, could get through. I had Ayala, my seven-week-old baby, on my shoulders as I made the opening. It was just enough to get them out."
As they emerged, firefighters guided them to safety onto the street. In front of Levin-Waldman stood a wall of rubble where his car had once been, and his feet were cut by glass from the explosion.
Unable to climb over the debris with his younger child on his shoulders, he handed her to a paramedic. Once he climbed over himself, he looked around—only to realize Ayala was no longer in sight.
"Here I was, covered in dust and blood, almost naked, wandering the street screaming, 'Where is my child?" he recalled. Some people thought the worst. It took about 30 minutes to find her."
Only 20 hours after Levin-Waldman survived the attack, another Iranian missile struck a building across from the hotel where he was staying in Rehovot. "The blast shattered the windows, and the entire building shook. We had a whole floor of people from our neighborhood traumatized, reliving the experience," he told Fox News Digital.
"The hardest part is confronting how fragile we are and how close we came to disaster," he said.
Since the conflict began on June 13, Iranian missile attacks have killed 24 Israelis and wounded over 800.
The missiles do not discriminate—neither between men and women, children and the elderly, nor between Jew and Arab. That reality was tragically underscored over the weekend when four women were killed by a ballistic missile that scored a direct hit on their home in the predominantly Arab town of Tamra, just north of Haifa.
These terror missiles also make no distinction between the political left and right.
Israeli Opposition Leader Yair Lapid dodged a tragedy on Monday when his son's house in Tel Aviv suffered damage from the aftershock of a direct missile impact that left many residents of the central metropolis homeless.
"My one-year-old granddaughter's bed was covered in glass from an explosion caused by an Iranian missile. It is horrific to think what would have happened if she had been in bed," Lapid told Fox News Digital.
"This is the enemy we are facing—a regime dedicated to our destruction and aiming to kill as many innocent children as possible. We have to remove the nuclear threat and the missile threat—for the safety of Israel and the world," he added.
Coalition lawmaker Hanoch Mildwisky, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ruling Likud Party, lives across the street from a building in Petah Tikva–located 6.5 miles east of Tel Aviv–which sustained damage in an Iranian attack that killed four people.
"There were dislodged windows and cracks in the walls," Mildwisky told Fox News Digital. "In the building that was hit, there were unfortunately casualties. It was a very large missile, carrying nearly a ton of explosives, so the blast was massive and caused significant damage even hundreds of meters away from the impact site."
Mildwisky emphasized that Iran must not be allowed to possess atomic bombs or the capability to develop them—particularly given the regime's repeated declarations of intent to destroy the Jewish state.
As long as the threat remains, he said, Israel will be forced to continue its military operations.
Jamal Waraki, a Muslim volunteer with the ZAKA emergency service, had just completed a rescue mission—pulling an 80-year-old man from the rubble—when he returned home at 7:00 a.m. on Sunday to find his own house destroyed.
"That night, there was a missile impact in Rehovot. We tended to the building that had sustained a direct hit. Once we finished, I went home and discovered that my place too had been struck," Jamal told Fox News Digital.
Thankfully, no one was home at the time. Jamal's family had been staying with his mother-in-law in Eilat, where they still are. While awaiting the finalization of new housing arrangements, Jamal has been sleeping in his car.
Lihi Griner is well known in Israel due to her appearance in the local spinoff of the Big Brother reality TV show. She was in her safe room with her husband and three children when the Iranian missile struck Petah Tikva, in the same neighborhood as lawmaker Mildwisky. Griner resides in a complex with four residential buildings, one of which was directly hit.
"There was a huge boom," she told Fox News Digital. "The kids were shocked, they started to cry, and we kept telling ourselves that there was an impact, but we're alive. It was surreal. I couldn't believe it happened to me."
After receiving the all-clear to leave the safe room, she opened the door and found everything was completely destroyed. "Our windows were blown out of the walls, the doors were broken in half, the walls were damaged with big cracks, and all the balconies in the front of the building were demolished," said Griner.
Initially, residents were sent to a school across the street, where authorities offered hotel options at no cost. Soldiers later escorted Griner's family back to their apartment so they could retrieve their belongings. While the residence is now safe, they can't sleep there due to the lack of windows.
"I live day by day. I'm just happy we're alive. It gives us time to figure out what comes next," Griner said.
For Levin-Waldman, what came next was an unexpected phone call from the Rishon Lezion municipality on Wednesday. To his relief, another member of the family had been found alive and unharmed four days after the attack: their dog, Zvika.
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