Central Israel – At least six people were seriously injured Thursday morning when an Iranian ballistic missile struck Be’er Sheva’s Soroka Medical Centre, as part of a larger barrage that also targeted Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, and Holon.
“We hit nuclear and missile targets precisely, and they hit the hospital’s paediatric ward. That says it all,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he surveyed the damage at the hospital.
The attacks on Israel have left many homeless and fortunate to be alive. Ariel Levin-Waldman is one such individual. He was at his in-laws’ home in Rishon LeZion, where he and his family had been staying for several months while they renovated their own home, when an Iranian missile struck the residential neighbourhood. The attack killed two people and injured dozens more; a third person died in an earlier wave of Iranian strikes.
“At around 5 a.m., I received the same missile alert that everyone in the country receives,” Levin-Waldman told Fox News Digital. “I grabbed my phone, dashed downstairs with my wife and children, and we got to the shelter. My mother-in-law has joined us.”
The missile then struck the building.
“There was a flash of light, and everything went black. “We were choking and struggling to breathe,” Levin-Waldman explained. Knowing that help might not arrive in time, he continued, “I couldn’t wait to be rescued.” We were suffocating, and I was worried we would be buried alive.”
Levin-Waldman attempted to survey the damage inside the shelter, but the thick cloud of dust made visibility nearly impossible. He could only make out that his arms and legs were still intact. The floor had become uneven, and the walls had been damaged by the force of the explosion.
It was at that point that he realised the explosion had thrown a book cabinet across the shelter, striking his mother-in-law in the head.
“She was bleeding heavily, and I realised she had been calling out ‘save us’ in Hebrew, but her voice was faint,” he said afterwards. “I was able to lift the cabinet off my mother-in-law, and when I did, I noticed a potential escape route. I cleared the way for my wife, Tali, and our two-and-a-half-year-old, Renana. As I made the opening, I carried my seven-week-old baby Ayala on my shoulders. It was only enough to get them out.
As they emerged, firefighters led them to safety on the street. Levin-Waldman faced 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 over to a paramedic. He climbed over himself and looked around, only to realise Ayala was no longer visible.
“Here I was, covered in dust and blood, almost naked, wandering the street screaming, ‘Where is my child?” he told me. Some people assumed the worst. It took approximately 30 minutes to locate her.”
Only 20 hours after Levin-Waldman survived the attack, another Iranian missile struck a building across from his hotel in Rehovot. “The blast shattered the windows, and the whole structure shook. “We had an entire floor of people from our neighbourhood traumatised and 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 told me.
Since the conflict began on June 13, Iranian missile attacks have killed 24 Israelis and injured more than 800.
The missiles do not discriminate between men and women, children and the elderly, or Jews and Arabs. This reality was tragically underscored over the weekend when four women were killed by a ballistic missile that struck their home in the predominantly Arab town of Tamra, just north of Haifa.
These terror missiles also do not distinguish between the political left and right.
Israeli Opposition Leader Yair Lapid narrowly avoided a tragedy on Monday when his son’s Tel Aviv home was damaged by the aftershock of a direct missile impact that left many residents homeless.
“My one-year-old granddaughter’s bed was covered in glass after an explosion caused by an Iranian missile. “It’s terrifying to imagine what would have happened if she had been in bed,” Lapid told Fox News Digital.
“This is the enemy we face—a regime bent on destroying us and killing as many innocent children as possible. “We must eliminate the nuclear and missile threats for Israel’s and the world’s safety,” he said.
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, 6.5 miles east of Tel Aviv, which was damaged in an Iranian attack that killed four people.
“There were dislodged windows and cracks in the walls,” Mildwisky told Fox News Digital. “Unfortunately, there were casualties in the hit building. It was a large missile with nearly a tonne of explosives, so the blast was massive and caused significant damage hundreds of meters away from the impact site.”
