Photo: AFP
For the residents of Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities and towns during the Iranian rocket attacks, life has a familiar pattern between the time spent on the streets and in the bomb shelters. That, unfortunately, is part of the daily sequence of events living in a war-torn region. For the thousands of citizens of other nations, however, the experience of dropping what you’re doing to head for a bomb shelter is rather unfamiliar and upsetting. It’s a situation that New York Sun associate editor Ari Hoffman can now comprehend. While in Tel Aviv on an unrelated story, air riad sirens suddenly went off. Hoffman appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to describe the uneasy sensation.
“We were woken up at about eight o’clock this morning by air raid sirens and rocket alerts,” Hoffman told host Larry Mendte. “Not the kind of alarm clock you want to set. It turns out that I could actually hear the boom of intercepted rockets over Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv was not hit in this latest barrage; a suburb called Ramat Gan was. But the real big news out of this latest Iranian barrage was the striking of the Soroka medical center. Now, that’s down in the country south, in a city called Beer Sheba in the middle of the desert… it just reinforces how volatile the situation here continues to be.”
Hoffman is now turning his efforts to the U.S. Embassy to figure out how he’ll get out of the region and back home, but with airports closed, that’s proving easier said than done: “The airspace is still closed except for certain incoming flights that are bringing fighting-age Israelis back into the country. I think things are kind of frozen until we see even a minimal pick-up of aviation. Needless to say, as long as rockets are falling that’s a difficult thing to imagine.”
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