Photo: AFP
It must have been a scary time to be in the Middle East as the Iranians shot rockets into Israel in the days flanking the American attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites. For those who have the means to do so, escape suddenly becomes the priority if you want to stay alive. Ari Hoffman is the associate editor of the New York Sun. He was in Tel Aviv three weeks ago covering another story when Iranian rockets started to fall on the city. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program from the safety of his office in New York to share the details of his harrowing escape from the carnage.
“It was quite a dramatic exit,” Hoffman told host Larry Mendte. “What I did was made my way to the border of Jordan; that’s a land crossing where you line up early in the morning. In fact, as I was lined up in an open kind of field, I saw rockets overhead, and everyone had to kind of jump into a ditch, put their head behind their legs- you know, like some of those old Cold War protocols-and wait for the missile fire to end. Anyway, I made my way across the Jordan border and then hitched a ride about three hours to Amman, and then a Jordan to Qatar flight.”
Hoffman says foreigners was limited to one of three routes out of Israel, as conditions deteriorated and other options became too dangerous: “A missile had actually hit close to the port in Haifa, so that option was taken off-line, as well as the Cypriot and Israeli authorities detected a terrorist plot by Iran in Cyprus against people who were potentially in transit, so it was quite a hairy and chaotic situation to get out.”
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