Iranian missiles strike Tamra, an Arab-majority town in Israel

Sometimes the lottery that separates life from death brushes right past you. People in the neighborhood say that Ehab, a man in his forties, isn’t quite sure what he would have preferred — on which side he would have wanted to end up. Late Saturday night, he was inserting the key into his front door when there was a deafening blast. Everything shook, and the two-story building that housed the home of Ehab and his brother in the town of Tamra, in northern Israel, was left nearly in ruins. A missile launched from Iran had just made a direct hit.

He survived by a miracle. But the force of the explosion killed most of his family. His wife Manar, 41; his daughters Shadah, 20, and Hala, 15; and his sister-in-law, also named Manar, 46. Both women were well-known schoolteachers in this Arab-majority Israeli town. Only one person in the house at the time survived: Razan, 18, also Ehab’s daughter. Locals say that her father is now by her side, caring for her at the hospital.

Israel and Iran have been exchanging attacks for three days, ever since the government of Benjamin Netanyahu launched an unprecedented offensive on Friday against what it considers its greatest enemy. Iranian projectiles have killed 10 people in the past few hours — including the four in Tamra. Over these three days, 13 people have died in Israel, while the death toll in the Islamic Republic reached 120 as of Saturday, according to Iranian media citing government sources.

One of the people surveying the scene of the Tamra attack — speaking with police officers, neighbors, damage assessors, and emergency workers — is the mayor of the town, which has around 20,000 residents. “It’s obvious that the missile was aimed at Haifa, not here in Tamra,” says Musa Abu Rumi.

The mayor is aware that the Iranian regime is targeting the same types of sites that Israel is striking in Iran — including energy infrastructure. Haifa, in the north, is Israel’s main port, and its bay is home to the largest oil refinery, which was hit in one of this weekend’s attacks. However, according to the company that operates it, essential operations have not been interrupted.

“We have to acknowledge that sometimes there’s a lack of precision, and that’s why it ended up here,” he adds. But the mayor of Tamra is quick to point out that the Arab-Israeli community — around 20% of Israel’s 10 million people — are treated as second-class citizens, even when it comes to being protected from attacks. “There is a strategy to specifically protect certain areas of the country, and unfortunately, the Arab communities are not among those government priorities,” he laments.

The impact was so intense that, even 18 hours later, on Sunday afternoon, victim remains were still being found about 50 meters away, in a neighbor’s garden. One of the locals, Baker Hiwan, 25, is at a loss for words. Standing on the rooftop of his house, he says: “The power went out, and everything went dark. It was just nerves, fear… You don’t know what to do. All you could hear were screams.”

Among the rubble and twisted metal are clothes, books, personal items, documents — all coated in a layer of dust. By midday, the loud procession of excavators began, scooping up and hauling away everything that couldn’t be salvaged.

Yasmín Marisat, a 28-year-old doctor, was one of the first to arrive at the site, shortly after 11 p.m. What she found was an “apocalyptic and catastrophic scene,” she describes 14 hours later, still on site, wearing her orange helmet, backpack, and emergency uniform. She explains that many of the people she treated were suffering from panic attacks, but the total number of injured is around 20.

In the early 2000s, Ehab and his brother had built a house that they divided into two two-story homes — one for each family. That’s common among Palestinian Arabs, who make up the entire population of this town on the outskirts of Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city. The result was a solid, spacious building with heavy, decorative architecture. Outside, the façade was dominated by gray cement, large windows, rosettes, and latticework. It was a well-constructed home, compliant with laws requiring a shelter or safe room (miklat, in Hebrew) in case of aerial attacks. Each home had two. But the sheer force of the missile was overwhelming. The destruction was so extensive that emergency crews found one of the upstairs shelters crushed like an accordion onto the one directly below it.

All activity comes to a halt on the street of the disaster around 4 p.m. Alarms go off on cell phones warning of another possible attack. The police present at the scene urge everyone to seek shelter. About 20 people gather inside the miklat of one of the houses hit by the explosion but still standing. Among them is Father Simón, a Christian priest who traveled from the Galilee region to express solidarity with the victims. “God is the true light,” he says in the cramped, darkened shelter before, once the danger has passed, leaving the house and continuing to kindly offer blessings to everyone he meets.

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