Waking up Saturday morning in the Israeli city of Bet Shemesh, where he’s visiting his daughter, Harry Fisher heard concussive booms he thought might have come from a nearby construction site.
The retired Morning Call photographer would soon discover the noises heralded what turned out to be Israel’s darkest day in decades: a massive air and ground assault by the Hamas militants who occupy Gaza, a Palestinian enclave on the Mediterranean Sea in the nation’s southwest.
The booms came from Israel’s Iron Dome defensive missile installations intercepting thousands of incoming rockets — a bombardment that unfolded as Hamas fighters poured out of Gaza and launched ground attacks in some two dozen Israeli communities, killing or kidnapping hundreds of soldiers and civilians.
The latest war to erupt in the troubled region has claimed more than 1,500 lives so far, from the initial attacks and from Israel’s furious response. It’s been likened to the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, with its indications of significant intelligence failures and its profound psychological impact on the population.
In a phone interview Monday around 3:45 p.m. local time, Fisher said Bet Shemesh, about an hour’s drive from Gaza, was quiet. Many stores were shuttered and the streets barren, as is the case across much of the nation.
The only significant activity was at a market where Fisher and others were stocking up on supplies.
“The army is basically getting the message out that people shouldn’t be moving around at all,” he said. “There was some intelligence that there might be an action by hostile people today, so everybody is trying to be super careful.”
Fisher and his wife, Amy, live in the Allentown area and frequently visit Israel, where their children, Nathan Fisher and Elana Kerner, live.
They had gone to Bet Shemesh to welcome Elana’s newest child, a daughter, and celebrate the stretch of holy days that begins with Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. The fast-growing city is about midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
“I’ve never been exposed to anything like this in my entire life,” Fisher said. “There are jets thundering overhead night and day. I watched attack helicopters flying in formation.”
Out of the blue
Saturday, the Sabbath, coincided with Simchat Torah, a festive holiday when Jews complete the annual cycle of reading the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Though Fisher suspected the noises he awoke to could have come from a military operation, he scanned the brilliant blue morning skies and saw no aircraft, smoke or other signs of trouble, so he departed as planned for an 8:30 prayer service.
An hour into the service, air raid sirens blared — the first Fisher ever heard in his many visits to Israel. Worshippers were told to go across the street and shelter in a reinforced apartment stairwell.
Fisher recounted the next minutes in a Facebook post to friends:
“Understanding now that something horrible had occurred, I bailed out of the prayer service to check on my daughter and grandchildren in their nearby apartment,” he wrote. “I again heard loud compressions sounds as I observed two Iron Dome air defense systems implode two incoming rockets above my head. They appeared eerily close.
“Everywhere I looked, visitors and residents frantically ran for cover. I dashed into the nearest building — a public school — and headed toward the bomb shelter downstairs. Ironically, a prayer service takes place in that shelter every week, and I was welcomed in.”
Since the attack, Fisher said, the lives of virtually all Israelis have been thrown into tumult.
Hundreds of thousands have been summoned to active military duty as Israel prepares for what will likely be an extended incursion into Gaza and, perhaps, a wider conflict. Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups — especially the large and well-equipped Hezbollah — are known to be funded and supplied by Iran.
Fisher said the potential for a greater conflict is unnerving but isn’t foremost in anyone’s mind.
“People are worried about their children who have been drafted,” he said. “They’re worried about keeping their families safe, about not having deliveries of services and products. And the children are traumatized right now. They’re freaked out.”
‘I’m scared of the sirens’
Elana Kerner said her 2-year-old son knows that air-raid sirens mean the family has to crowd into his room, a reinforced section of the apartment that serves as a bomb shelter. Given their distance from Gaza, the family has 90 seconds to reach shelter once rockets are detected.
“He’s already started saying, ‘I’m scared of the sirens,’ ” she said.
(On Monday evening local time, Israeli authorities advised citizens to prepare their bomb shelters for long-term use, with at least a three-day supply of food and water, medicines, radios, medical documents and other necessities).
Kerner and her husband, Yisrael, called Yissie, went through the house Monday to find items they could donate to the citizens reporting for military service.
Because the call-up was so massive and hasty, “a lot of people didn’t have time to bring much with them,” Kerner said. “And the army weren’t prepared to call so many reserves, so they’re short on basics.”
Kerner said her husband moved to Israel when he was older and did not have to enlist in the military for required service, so he is not part of the reserves. That has left the family intact to face whatever’s next.
“You hear that we’re in war and that alone is very terrifying,” she said, speaking of the constant thunder of jets punctuated by the distant booming of missile defenses. “It’s hard. Emotionally, you don’t want to get too overwhelmed. On the other hand, I’m a social worker and I know it’s important to release these emotions.”
Striking this balance “is one of the things Israelis are very good at,” she added. “If we can’t continue to function as an everyday people, essentially we look at it as if the terrorists won.”
Fisher first visited Israel in 1998 for a Morning Call assignment on Lehigh Valley residents who had moved there.
“My experience on that trip led me to become more active in the Jewish community in Allentown and led me to become a more observant Jew,” he said. “I think it must have rubbed off on my kids. I never told them they should live in Israel, they made that decision on their own.”
He isn’t sure whether he and his wife will cut their visit short.
“We don’t have active plans to leave but if the state department says Americans should come home and provides a mechanism to leave, we probably will,” he said.
His daughter is reluctant to look that far ahead.
“This is our home and we want to stay here,” she said.
Morning Call reporter Daniel Patrick Sheehan can be reached at 610-820-6598 or dsheehan@mcall.com.
