Dear friends,
Friday morning - the weekend has begun in Israel. I wake up at 7 am, then talk on the phone with a friend who also lives in Haifa. We are wondering how seriously we should take Nassrallah's last speach, where he advised the Arab residents of Haifa to leave the city if they value their lives. We finish the conversation with the now popular sign off - "may we have a quiet day". I read on the Internet that the Western Galilee and the city of Nahariyah have been under missile attack since 7 am. At 9:45 the air raid siren sounds.
Our son, who has returned from his army base, is still asleep. My wife Iris and I yell to him to run quickly with us to the bomb shelter of our apartment building - one floor up. We have about 15 seconds left until the missiles hit. As soon as we enter the shelter, trying to catch our breath after the run up with the rest of our neighbors, we hear the first blast. After about 2 seconds another 8 missiles hit, almost simultaneously.
The last hit sounds as if it had entered our shelter - the ground shakes as if it were an earthquake and some of the neighbors feel sick with fright caused by the deafening noise; they ask for some water. We feel we just had a miracle; one neighbor says that God must be watching over our building. We go back to our apartment, hoping this was our "daily dose" of missiles and that from now on the day will continue peacefully. 4 minutes later another siren sounds. When we reach the shelter we hear the blasts of more missile hits.
The radio reports that the missiles fell very close to us. My neighbor, who is pregnant, announces to her husband that she can't take the pressure anymore, and unless he wants to assist with an early delivery inside the shelter he has to get her out of the line of fire, to a safer place. We walk back to our apartment, but before I have a chance to even close the door - another siren sounds. Again we run up to the shelter. 4 blasts sound, the last one unusually strong.
When we finally return home, the radio announces that 16 missiles had hit Haifa, damaging property and lightly injuring several people, but thank God no-one killed this time. On TV we see the images of the severe damage sustained by a buiding 40 meters away from where a missile fell - a sign of the missile's size and the extensive damage it can cause. The main highway from Haifa to Tel Aviv is closed after a missile landed on the road leading out of Haifa. I look at my wife and say: It's only 11 am. What a morning....
It's been a month since the war started, and the daily "dose" of missiles has not changed. We hope for many more miracles when these huge, deadly missiles land in open fields and not in populated areas.
All the hotels in the south of Israel are full. Near the southern city of Ashkelon a huge "refugee camp" was erected in the beginning of the war, paid for by an Israeli tycoon. Close to 6,000 "refugees from the north" sleep in tents on the beach. This is Israel's home front in 2006.
Eshel