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Family in northern Israeli city saved by a shoe closet

The Saada family’s house was half destroyed by a Hezbollah drone but no one was hurt.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A Jewish family in Acre was saved Sunday when their shoe closet withstood the explosion of a Hezbollah drone hitting their home.

It was part of a Hezbollah barrage of some 250 rockets and drones that rained over northern Israel from 5:30-7:00 AM in retaliation for a preemptive strike the IDF carried out just previously in South Lebanon, destroying thousands of launchers ready to fire at sensitive targets as far south as Tel Aviv.

“My wife was in the bedroom upstairs with our four daughters,” Ami Saada told Radio 104.5FM. “She had a premonition and woke them up a minute before the Red Alert siren sounded, and took them downstairs to our protected space, which is a shoe closet [built into] a concrete shaft.

“While they were sitting inside, they heard a boom and the entire house shook. I had just left for work and my wife called me and told me to hurry back,” he said.

The closet is only a meter wide, but the five managed to squeeze in and close the door.

“I have no house [left] to live in,” Saada said. “The girls’ rooms – everything is damaged, glass everywhere, on their beds, holes in the walls, the ceilings fell.”

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In an interview with Kan Radio, he pointed out that his daughters could have been seriously hurt or worse from the attack, because “my daughters’ bed, the two beds up there, everything is covered in glass with really sharp points.”

His 11-year-old told Channel 11 that the drone’s crash caused a power outage.

“We couldn’t see anything, and there was smoke. We felt suffocated and burned,” she said.

“Your room was destroyed. You don’t have a room, you don’t have anywhere to sleep, it’s really sad,” she added.

The family will be housed at least temporarily in a local hotel.

Other homes and a nursery school were also hit in Acre.

Residents showed reporters fragments of rockets, and echoed Saada in describing how their apartments were filled with shards of glass from windows that had shattered from near misses.

One man said that he ran his business from his home, and “all my computers and equipment” were in a room that had been directly damaged, but he and his family were safe because they had been running down to the building’s bomb shelter.

He said they were lucky not to have reached yet the ground floor, which was in open air, when the rocket hit very nearby, spreading shrapnel over a large radius.

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Mayor Amichai Ben-Shlush told 104.5FM, “What happened this morning was a huge miracle. It was a difficult morning – shrapnel from interceptor rockets – an entire building destroyed, stressed residents. People were miraculously saved because they heeded instructions.”

Only one fatality was recorded from the Hezbollah attack, that of Petty Officer 1st Class David Moshe Ben Shitrit, when either fragments of an Iron Dome interceptor or the interceptor itself hit his boat off the Israeli coast. The IDF is still investigating exactly what happened in the incident.