Published: 16 April 2024
Last updated: 16 April 2024
On Sunday night, the word most frequently searched in Google in Israel at 2 am was tehillim, meaning psalms. I can understand why many Jews wanted to pray at that time, as after days of build-up, Iran attacked Israel with 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles.
At 1.30am, we heard loud booms over our apartment in Jerusalem and rushed our kids down to the shelter. Anxiously sitting it out with our neighbours for 20 long minutes felt like hours.We were all frightened. Between the booms from exploding missiles, countered by the Iron Dome defence system, and the air raid sirens, we talked with our neighbours, many of whom we had last encountered in the same shelter on October 7, when we took to the shelter under Hamas rocket attack as those in the south were massacred and kidnapped.
This night felt very different. Unlike that black Saturday, which took us by surprise and had devastating consequences, on April 14, we were ready.
Two weeks earlier, on April 1, in a precision air attack attributed to Israel, seven senior officers in Iran’s al-Quds Force were killed in an air attack on a building claimed by Iran to be its consulate in Damascus, adjacent to the Iranian embassy. Due to the advance warning given by Iran of their intention to retaliate, this time, we were prepared to defend ourselves.
Ultimately, 99% of the drones and missiles fired from Hamedan in Iran, the city where Ester and Mordechai are buried, were intercepted by Israeli air defences with support from allies. The next day, many Jewish Israelis felt as if we had experienced a Purim story in our lifetimes, with a Persian threat again being neutralised by greater powers and circumstances of fate that acted in our favour.
Rather than generate a desire for revenge, the experience of April 14 increased my empathy for all parents who need to care for their children in times of war.
The one major injury from the Islamic Republic attack was Amina al-Hasoni, a seven-year-old Bedouin girl who was seriously wounded by falling shrapnel. She remains in hospital in critical condition. Were it not for systemic inequities in Israel, where over 300,000 Bedouins live in unrecognised villages with no bomb shelters, her relatives said, maybe she, too, could have been spared.
