At midnight on Friday Sveta’s four-year-old daughter was asleep on the floor outside their shattered apartment block, as the rest of the family weighed up where they should spend the night.
A missile from the first Iranian salvo fired at Tel Aviv had landed a couple of blocks away, killing at least one person, injuring at least 16 others and damaging hundreds of shops and homes in this quiet residential area.
The 37-year-old was sanguine about her own losses, and backed the government decision to attack Iran even though it had so quickly cost her family their home.
“I support it completely,” she said as her older daughter stroked their chihuahua. “This is nothing compared to what they will be able to do if they get their hand on the A-bomb [nuclear weapons]. We can’t afford for the Iranians to get them.
“We tell [our daughters] that as long as we go to the shelter together, everything is OK. The damage in the house is just material things.”
The family’s street, in a residential area of Ramat Gan town east of Tel Aviv, was busy with emergency services crunching over shattered glass and other wreckage to reach the building that took a direct hit.
It had been reduced to layers of concrete rubble and twisted steel, with an apparently undamaged cabinet hanging incongruously from the remains of the first floor.
Two hours after the explosion, rescue teams were still searching through the wreckage for survivors, as a drone buzzed overhead when the sirens wailed again.
Iran launched more than 150 missiles at Israeli in five waves overnight, and though most were intercepted, about 10 got through air defences, a military spokesperson said. Those strikes killed three people in the Tel Aviv area and injured more than 70 others around the country.
It was the bloodiest few hours inside Israel since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, but the toll was dwarfed by the damage that Israel inflicted on Iran.
Yaniv Nimni’s home lost its roof and all its windows in the last barrage just before dawn, when one of the missiles landed in his suburban street in the town of Rishon LeZion, just south of Tel Aviv.
“This is only money, as long as the family are OK, that’s what matters,” he said as he surveyed the damage. His only question about the government’s decision to hit Iran was why they left it so long. “It should have been done much earlier,” he said.
Israelis who have become used to occasional strikes from smaller, short-range rockets from Gaza or Lebanon were stunned by the destruction.
For saving lives, the country’s shelter network worked. The three people killed in Ramat Gan and Rishon LeZion had been outside protected areas when the missiles struck, authorities said.
The two-storey houses next to Nimni’s were stripped back to raw concrete and piles of rubble, their ceilings collapsed, furnishings shredded. Trees in their gardens were snapped to the ground and cars crumpled on the street outside.
At the edge of the police cordon in Ramat Gan, Bar, 31, begged to be allowed back into her building for just a few minutes to pick up a few things for her children.
The family escaped the bombing because they were staying with her parents. Bar realised they’d had a narrow escape when she recognised her home on the news and, after the all-clear, came back to try to check on their apartment.
“They told me I can’t go in because of the damage,” she said. “I’m anxious and in shock, and the kids are very scared. We have nowhere to go, no home to go back to.”
Residents of nearby buildings walked past dragging suitcases and weighed down with backpacks. Most were leaving to stay with friends and relatives, because the city government had declared a mass casualty event and was only offering camp beds in a nearby school.
A few hundred metres down the road Orly, 27, was helping a friend sweep up shattered glass from the window of a friend’s beauty salon.
“You see what a ballistic missile does? We are hundreds of metres away here,” she said. “We were in the shelter when it hit and you felt it. I’ve been through a couple of wars now and I knew this was different.”
Elia Digma, 18, lives near a high-rise residential building in central Tel Aviv that was hit in the first salvo and had come to inspect the damage. “It’s a miracle only five people were hurt here,” he said. “It was one hell of a boom, and everything shook.”
Shocked by the destruction and braced for more attacks, he too was still confident that a pre-emptive attack on Iran had been necessary.
“We are doing what we need to defend ourselves,” Elia said. “The Bible says if someone comes to kill you, you must kill them first. We are ready for anything and everything that will bring quiet.”
