A ‘War Day’ in The Life of Haifa

Sirens in Haifa. its surrounding areas and in the north of Israel have been going off all day, Monday, because of continuing missiles coming all the way from southern Lebanon.

Israeli media reports say the sirens are bellowing hard in the center of the city that doesn’t rest these days, either night or day. Eyewitness reports describe the incoming missiles as “heavy” while people scurrying in the streets looking for safe areas to hide.

It was a tough day, Monday, as described with at least 165 rockets being launched into different parts of Israel.

This is the first time since 2006 since Hezbollah launched direct hits on Haifa with rattled people – estimated at 300,000 – quickly going to underground shelters. At least 30 rockets hit the city at different times triggering the sirens and panic among people with many registering for therapy these days.

One of the areas hit was Kiryat Tivon to the southeast and surprisingly in the middle of the Haifa’s prestigious Technion Institute where a number of rockets from the north landed as part of a large-scale missile launch to reach all part of the country including Tiberias and Safad as estimated by the operations unit of the Israeli army.

With the rockets coming in sharp thuds, the fires in the different northern parts of Israel like Ein Zeitim have raged on, keeping the fire engines busy.

The strikes have been part of wider military launches from southern Lebanon including to Acca, Upper Galilee and Lower Galilee while missiles reaching to the occupied West Bank, about 120 kilometers from the Lebanese border.

This is the first long stretch of rocket launches and show that Hezbollah has a lot of missiles in their storerooms despite the Israeli claims that 50 percent of their military hardware have been destroyed.

But the city of Haifa has been under bombardment since early this week with the Ramat David Airbase and other sensitive sites being under attack and hit for a second time on Sunday, which means that nervousness among the people and workers continue.

Hezbollah rockets also landed on the Israeli Rafael Advanced Defense Systems military-industrial complex, which specializes in electronic warfare, using the-now-becoming-famous Fadi-I, Fadi-II and Katyusha rocket weapons. 

The complex lies to the north of Haifa and is supposed to be the pride of Israeli military industrial ingenuity but for how long many wounder.

A settler from Kiryat Bialik, north of Haifa, told Maariv: “We have never seen anything like this before, not even in 2006. We all assumed that there would be a response from Hezbollah, but we did not think it would be this strong, especially when there is Iron Dome, which is supposed to protect us.”

Talk of the Iron Dome these days, seems to be a dead duck affair since it is woefully failing to intercept many of the missiles that seems to be flying into Israeli airspace whether from Hezbollah, the Houthis of Yemen and the Islamist groups in Iraq.

But elation is not expected in this war for the Israeli army is fighting back and doing damage. On Monday evening, Lebanese Health Minister Firas Al Abiad announced 274 people were killed and 1024 injured in what the Israeli army said were over 1000 air raids into Lebanon.

Dr Asmar is a writer from Amman at crossfirearaabia.com