‘Something terrible has happened’: Israelis in Jaffa recall shock at terror attack | Israel

Debbie Kay, who lives in Tel Aviv’s coastal Jaffa district, argued with her teenage son on Tuesday evening about whether or not it was safe to leave the house.

He wanted to meet up with friends while she worried about reports that Iran was about to fire ballistic missiles at Israel.

If that happened, he would find shelter, he told her.

“Suddenly someone called me and said, ‘Please stay home,'” she recalled in an interview. “Something terrible happened about five minutes from your house.”

That evening, two men opened fire on a busy tram in a knife and gun attack, killing seven people and the two attackers. Minutes later, Iran launched the promised missile attack, sending Kay and her family to the safe room built into most apartments in the neighborhood’s newer buildings.

Millions of Israelis across the country sought shelters on Wednesday evening to escape the bombardment in which Iran fired an estimated 180 rockets – the most fired against Israel in a single night since Hamas attacks on October 7 and 20 Beginning of the war in Gaza.

Inbar Segev-Vigder, 33, was carrying her nine-month-old child on the tram when the attackers opened fire. She was killed in the attack, but her son Ari survived unharmed thanks to his mother’s protection.

“She literally defended him with her body,” Itai Dror, a close friend of Segev-Vigder, said in an interview after her funeral on Wednesday.

Her husband Yaari was riding his bicycle to the hospital to look for his wife and son when sirens began to wail, signaling the impending Iranian attack.

Some in the neighborhood said they were simultaneously ordered to barricade themselves in their homes because of the terrorist attack and seek shelter from the incoming rocket attack in local bunkers.

But when the rockets were fired, Kay said, she heard that the two attackers had been killed.

For her, the terrorist attack was “much more frightening than that of the Iranians,” said Kay. “It’s your worst nightmare because you have no control.”

“It’s a feeling of this real intrusion into a place where it was calm and there was a sense of togetherness,” she said of Jaffa, a mixed Arab-Jewish part of the city that has seen demonstrations for peace.

The couple sent Ari to a mixed daycare center and the family developed close relationships with an Arab staff member there, Dror said.

“Many Jews who live in Jaffa are proud of the coexistence of Jews and Arabs living together in the same place,” Dror said. “It’s really a shame that something like this happens to people who are trying to create a community life of everyone together.”

The attack there occurred the day before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, a holiday that marks the start of the High Holidays in the Jewish religion. They reach their peak on Yom Kippur, which begins at sunset on October 11, the Day of Atonement, when most Jews fast and ask for forgiveness.

“When I went shopping this morning, the neighborhood was like a ghost town,” Kay said. “Actually, instead of Rosh Hashanah, it was like Yom Kippur. That’s what it felt like. There wasn’t a soul on the street.”

Those in attendance, she said, wished each other a better year than the last – a traditional holiday greeting made all the more poignant by last year’s dark events.

“There’s a lot of fear and a lot of unknown,” she said.

There was a sense of concern across the country on Wednesday as Israel vowed to retaliate against Iran for the missile attack, potentially continuing a spiral of attacks that threatens to escalate into a regional war.

The effectiveness of Israel’s air defense meant that targeted missile attacks were thwarted in many cases. The only known person killed in the attack was a 38-year-old Gaza man who was at a Palestinian security force compound in the West Bank near Jericho when he was killed by falling rocket debris.

CCTV footage showed the man, named as Sameh Khadr Hassan al-Asali, crossing an intersection when he was crushed by a falling metal pipe. He was buried on Wednesday, witnesses told Reuters in Jericho.

Videos showed some of the rockets heading toward populated areas, including one that landed near a shopping center in Tel Aviv, the country’s largest city. But for the most part they either targeted military bases or landed in uninhabited locations across the country.

Photographs showed Palestinians inspecting an Iranian missile at a crossroads in the West Bank city of Hebron. Another showed people standing on a rocket in the Negev Desert near Arad, a city near the Dead Sea.

In Jaffa, Dror said, a sense of community is likely to remain despite the shock of the attack.

“Unfortunately we are too used to it,” said Dror. “I think that won’t be the case [destroy] the fabric of that community or that neighborhood, as painful as it is, even if someone you know and love is murdered…At some point life will go on, and at some point that neighborhood will continue to exist.”