According to the Jewish state army, more than 300 rockets targeted Israel on Wednesday and more than 3,000 in two and a half weeks. While most were destroyed in flight, several hit Haifa, the country’s third city, located around forty kilometers from the Lebanese border.
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From the outside, the Haifa Town Hall annex appears unremarkable, but the essentials are invisible here: four underground levels to house the most important municipal activities. “I now live underground and I no longer do my workexplains the mayor. I am not developing my city. I’m just looking out for her.”
Monitoring which takes place in particular from a security PC with giant screens to scan the entire city. “We have hundreds of video surveillance camerasdetails Eliran Tal, spokesperson for the municipality. And if a rocket hits Haifa, we can see where the damage is and send forces there.“
And this week, we had to intervene in several places for rockets not intercepted by the anti-aircraft defense or projectile debris. The neighborhood where Aliza lives was affected. From her badly damaged balcony, the retiree shows us the crater formed at the foot of her building two days earlier. “You see the gray area, where it’s burned? I was sleeping in the bedroom, my husband was watching football. We received the alert and we ran into the bedroom that serves as shelter. A few minutes later , we heard a loud ‘boom’.”
Several windows in the apartment were shattered. In the street, insurers are still working around damaged cars. “It’s just material damage, it can always be repaired”puts Aliza into perspective. But further north, in the town of Kiryat Shmona, two residents were killed by rocket fire on Wednesday October 9. It had been more than two months since Hezbollah vehicles had last killed a civilian. For Sivan, a mother in Haifa, the fear is omnipresent: “We hardly leave the house anymore. The children are doing school remotely. On Tuesday, I finally decided to go out. There started to be alerts and the missiles exploded above our heads. very scary.”
And for this to stop, Sivan is counting on the ongoing Israeli offensive. “The more the offensive advances in Lebanon, the more missiles we receiveshe explains. But we are ready to endure this temporarily. We want to change the situation, so that it improves.” A few minutes later, several dull explosions still echoed in the sky over Haifa. A new rocket fire leaves three people lightly injured in another neighborhood.