Debbie Kay, who lives in the seaside neighbourhood of Jaffa in Tel Aviv, was arguing with her teenage son on Tuesday evening about whether or not it was safe to leave the house.
He was wanting to meet friends, while she was concerned about reports that Iran was about to launch ballistic missiles at Israel.
If that happened, he would find a shelter, he told her.
“Suddenly someone called me and said ‘please stay home’,” she recalled in an interview. “Something terrible has happened, like, five minutes from your house.”
That evening, two men had opened fire on a busy tram in a knife and gun attack that left seven people dead, as well as the two assailants. Minutes later, Iran launched the promised missile attack, sending Kay and her family scrambling into the safe room that is built into most flats in the neighbourhood’s newer buildings for just that eventuality.
Millions of Israelis across the country took to bunkers on Wednesday evening to avoid the bombardment, in which Iran launched an estimated 180 missiles – the most unleashed in a single night against Israel since the 7 October attacks by Hamas and the beginning of the war in Gaza.
Inbar Segev-Vigder, 33, was carrying her nine-month-old child on the tram when the assailants opened fire. She was killed in the attack, but her son, Ari, survived unharmed due to his mother’s protection.
“She was literally, with her body, defending him,” Itai Dror, a close friend of Segev-Vigder’s, said in an interview after her funeral on Wednesday.
Her husband, Yaari, was cycling to the hospital to search for his wife and son as sirens began sounding announcing the impending Iranian strike.
Some in the neighbourhood said they had been simultaneously told to barricade themselves in their flats, because of the terror attack, and go to local bunkers to shelter from the incoming missile strike.
But by the time the missiles were launched, Kay said, she had heard that the two assailants had been killed.
For her, the terror attack was “much more scary than the Iranians”, Kay said. “It’s your worst nightmare because you’ve got no control.”
“It’s a feeling of that real intrusion into a place which has been quiet and had a feeling of togetherness,” she said of Jaffa, a mixed Arab-Jewish part of the city that has hosted pro-peace demonstrations.
The couple had sent Ari to a mixed daycare centre and the family was close with an Arab member of staff there, Dror said.
“A lot of the Jews that live in Jaffa have pride in the coexistence of the Jews and Arabs living together in the same place,” said Dror. “It’s a real shame that it happens to people who are trying to create a community life of everyone together.”
The attack there came the day before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, a holiday that marks the beginning of the high holy days in the Jewish religion. They culminate on Yom Kippur, which begins at sundown on 11 October, the day of atonement on which most Jews fast and seek forgiveness.
“This morning, when I had to go and do shopping, the neighbourhood was like a ghost town,” Kay said. “It was actually like, instead of Rosh Hashanah, it was like Yom Kippur. That’s how it felt. Wasn’t a soul in the streets.”
Those who were there, she said, were wishing each other a better year than the last – a traditional holiday greeting made more poignant by the dark events of the past year.
“There’s a lot of fear, and a lot of unknown,” she said.
Across the country, there was a sense of apprehension on Wednesday as Israel vowed to retaliate against Iran for the missile strike, potentially continuing a cycle of attacks that threatens to spiral into a regional war.
The effectiveness of the Israeli air defences meant that in many cases, the targeted missile strikes were thwarted. The only person known to have been killed in the attack was a 38-year-old man from Gaza who had been staying in a Palestinian security forces compound in the West Bank near Jericho when he was killed by falling missile debris.
CCTV video footage showed the man, who has been named as Sameh Khadr Hassan al-Asali, crossing a junction when he was crushed by a falling metal tube. He was buried on Wednesday, witnesses told Reuters in Jericho.
Video showed some of the missiles veering towards populated areas, including one that struck near a shopping centre in Tel Aviv, the country’s largest city. But largely they were either aimed at military bases or landed in unpopulated locations across the country.
Photographs showed Palestinians inspecting an Iranian missile at a road junction in the West Bank city of Hebron. Another showed people standing on a missile in the Negev desert near Arad, a town close to the Dead Sea.
In Jaffa, Dror said, the sense of community would probably endure despite the shock of the attack.
“Unfortunately, we’re too used to it,” said Dror. “I think this won’t [destroy] the fabric of this community or this neighbourhood, as painful as it is, even when someone you know and love is being murdered … Eventually life will go on, and eventually this neighbourhood will keep existing.”
