JERUSALEM, Israel – Continued threats and flying missiles from Iran make it difficult for Israelis who are attempting to go about their daily lives, and those directly affected by the strikes are trying to recover. CBN News spoke with one survivor after a missile hit his home.
At the onset of Tehran’s missile barrage in mid-June, Ariel Levin-Waldman and his family headed to the bomb shelter, not knowing what to expect.
He told us, “About five in the morning, I got an alert on my phone. The alert said, ‘Get to a shelter in extreme danger of missile fire.’ And I run downstairs, grab my wife and kids. My mother-in-law was on the way down, and we had gotten our way into the bomb shelter in the basement of the house. The door was still open because we were waiting for her father to come down as well. And that’s when the missile hit the house. There was this flash of light – loud boom – and everything went black.”
Suddenly, the air filled with dust and concrete, making it difficult to breathe.
“We were all screaming. My wife was screaming. My kids were screaming. My mother-in-law was screaming. And I’ll be honest, I was screaming too, because we were not exactly in the best headspace in the world, panicking,” Levin-Waldman recalled. “Yes, I recovered first from the screaming because I realized that if I’m here and screaming, I’m still alive.”
He had his phone in the shelter and called the police. Yet, with his family injured and barely able to breathe, he realized they couldn’t wait for rescuers to find them.
“I grabbed a bottle of water to drink enough to stop the choking. It gave me the ability to think and to focus, put the flashlight on my phone, but I still couldn’t see anything because it went from pitch black to pitch white from all the dust and the concrete in the air, but (it) was enough for me to get a sense of my surroundings, in the sense that all of my parts were still attached and I wasn’t doing badly or (hurt) much at all.” Levin-Waldman said.
A damaged bookcase had trapped his mother-in-law.
“It was pinned to the wall and covered in blood,” he told us. “So, I threw my kid, my little one, the seven-week-old baby, over my shoulder and lifted the cabinet off of her with one hand. (I) Tried to make a way for my wife and my kid (who is not even 3 years old) to get out of the shelter.”
As they exited the shelter, a voice called out to them.
Levin-Waldman believes it was a firefighter.”I had no idea who it was because there’s so much dust, and I wasn’t exactly seeing things clearly. But he leads us up through the stairways of the basement. The place had been subdivided, the basement into a secondary apartment.”
He explained that the wall of the secondary apartment had been blown open, clearing a path for the family to get upstairs. He is convinced they would have been buried alive if the missile hadn’t blown open the apartment wall.
As he climbed out with glass in his feet, Levin-Waldman handed his baby to a rescuer so he could get out. There, his family’s two cars lay buried underneath the rubble.
He stated, “It was a bit of a chaotic time, because in the moment that I turned back to help my wife with the other kid (his daughter), the paramedics had taken my baby to the paramedics station in the streets and (I) had no idea where she was. And people see me covered in blood and dust, walking down the street in a daze, screaming, ‘Where’s my baby? Where’s my baby?’ And I think they thought the worst.”
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Levin-Waldman, who works at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv, says they gave him more than medical help, and he’s grateful.
“All of our worldly possessions — credit cards, our clothes – are all smithereens. Actually, that’s where Sheba Hospital was very important. They gave us clothes. They gave us toys for the kids. They got us started again,” he declared.
Less than 24 hours after the missile strike, they had another close call at the hotel where they had been taken.
He recalled, “The hotel is right across the street from the Weisman Institute of Science, which took a direct hit from a missile and blew out all the windows of the hotel. That was not good for my nerves, to say the least.”
Four days after the blasts, rescue workers pulled their dog, Tzvika, out of the rubble…alive!
Still, Levin-Waldman knows who saved them.
“When I say that we are only alive by the grace of God, I mean that, because there’s no luck, there’s no physical explanation that I could imagine for us taking a direct missile hit and all six of us being alive at the end of it. And we all made it out, effectively uninjured. It’s just statistically, physically – I don’t understand how,” he reflected.
And, he adds, it must be for a reason.
It’s pretty obvious too,, somebody does not want me dead yet – for whatever purpose. And that’s the case.
When we remarked that God is watching over him, he responded, “I have stuff to do in this world. I don’t know what it is yet, but whatever, I’m going to do it.”
