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On a quiet Jaffa backstreet, Israel’s twin fears intersected on Tuesday, seemingly by pure chance, set in motion by the unnerving crackle of gunshots.
“Hey — do you know what’s going on? I think I hear a lot of shooting,” the voice note, sent at 7:01pm on Tuesday, said. Two Palestinian assailants had just stepped off the light rail on to a leafy boulevard in the Tel Aviv neighbourhood, and opened fire.
Exactly 30 minutes later, as police swarmed the scene and ambulances raced away with the wounded, the eerie sound of air raid sirens rang across Israel — Iranian missiles had pierced the air space, streaking across the night sky, many to targets just a few kilometres north.
In that coincidental but fateful moment, Israelis confronted the anxieties that have consumed them for most of their lives — a chance encounter with death from a determined gunman, and an attack by a powerful enemy, aiming its resources at their territory.
In the hour that followed, Israeli air defences boomed as they fired interceptor after interceptor, chasing some 180 missiles in a spectacle broadcast live on television screens and social media feeds.
Families huddled in their safe rooms, trying to keep their children’s spirits up — the latest reminder of danger after nearly a year of war with Israel’s neighbours to the south and the north.
In the end, the Palestinian gunmen caused more pain than the Iranian missiles — six civilians were killed and nine were injured — before they were “neutralised” by bystanders in that south Tel Aviv neighbourhood.
First responders were forced to work through the howling of the air raid sirens as they tended the wounded.
Unlike in April, when Iran launched 300 missiles in a well-telegraphed retaliation for Israel’s killing of Iranian personnel in a bombing at its Damascus consulate, there was much less time for Israelis to prepare.
As the missiles tore across the nearly 1,000 miles between Iran and Israel, they also frightened the citizens of the countries beneath their trajectory, many of them already anxious that a regional war was on the verge of breaking out.
In Amman, the Jordanian capital, people reported seeing multiple missiles intercepted over the city, some near the US embassy, and said their houses violently shook from the impact.
“It was super intense, I’ve never witnessed such a thing before,” said Ibraheem Shaheen, a 32-year-old news producer living in the city.
Shaheen said this attack felt different from April’s because it came without warning. “Things are back to normal. But we lived a terrifying hour,” he said.
Unlike those under the missiles’ flight path, the Israeli army was prepared — US intelligence had caught wind of Iran’s preparations and warned Israel earlier in the day. The country’s famed Iron Dome and other air defences swung into action, knocking all but a handful of the missiles out of the sky before they found their targets.
At a hotel in East Jerusalem, the sirens sounded in the middle of a wedding party. Guests and relatives descended into the basement of a hotel in the predominantly Palestinian neighbourhood as wave after wave of air raid warnings interrupted the festivities.
Photographers idled away the time and the bride kept her cool as the party waited for the regular, booming sounds to subside. For close to an hour, the explosions — the sound of Israeli air defences shooting down volleys of rockets — reverberated overhead, and across the country.
But the guests, initially gripped by the missile alerts chorusing from their phones, soon grew tired of the enforced waiting. In the basement singing and ululating briefly broke out, and once the all-clear was issued, the group headed upstairs en masse to continue the party.
In Jaffa, the tense silence that followed the attack and the missile barrages was also broken by singing, this time by a group of Israelis gathered in the street while residents of the neighbourhood tentatively came outside to shop for groceries and walk their dogs.
Four streets from where the shooting attack unfolded, an ice-cream shop raised its shutters and flipped on its neon lights, its name both coincidental and fateful for an evening such as this — Victory.
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