Special Report, June 12, 2024

Missile/suicide drone attacks in Northern Israel today

This is just a brief announcement to tell my friends and followers that I am safe. An American who moved to Israel in 2017, I live about 8 km from the Lebanese border and about 15 km from the sea.

Today, on the Jewish holiday of Shavuoth (commemorating the giving of the 10 Commandments on Mt. Sinai), Hizbollah fired some 200 missiles and suicide drones into Israel, mostly between 9 AM and 10:30AM—the time when Jews were packed into synagogues for this holy day.

Our enemies have a habit of interrupting our holidays and Sabbaths: Yom Kippur War, October 7 (Simchat Torah), and today. My community has, so far, had few attacks, but when we get them they are almost all a few moments before the Sabbath begins or during the time most observant Jews would be eating their special Sabbath dinner.

The claim that today’s attacks were in retaliation for anything is bunk (the old word for disinformation). The Hizbollah officer was killed yesterday evening, but they sent a lot of attacks yesterday during the day, hours before his death. We all knew that since it was a major holiday they would send major attacks today; it just garners them sympathy to claim that they would not have attacked us if we hadn’t killed their officer.

When rockets (relatively simple), missiles (more technologically advanced) and suicide drones are fired, our defense system instantly understands the trajectory. If they are headed to a populated area, a siren sounds in that area and people know to take cover. Where I live, we have at most 5 seconds from the start of the siren to impact.

The Iron Dome takes out the vast majority of incoming materiel that are headed for populated areas. This can be seen in the sky. The boom of something being blown up is loud and reverberates over a very wide area. Then the pieces fall to the ground, a process that can take nearly ten minutes. So we have to stay down, preferably in a safe place, with our hands over our heads, for ten minutes. One of the first things I bought at the beginning of the war was a utilitarian wristwatch so I could time this if I were caught without my phone. Ten minutes waiting for shrapnel to fall feels like a half-hour.

Today

The booms started around 9 am. They came fast and furious for awhile, then another barrage came around 10 AM, and a third from noon to about 1 pm. The 9-10 AM attacks appear to have been timed to disrupt synagogue services and the later ones to disrupt the holiday meal.

In my synagogue, we were standing to hear the Ten Commandments read as part of our Torah reading when the 10 AM booms interrupted. While some people ran (the women’s section is upstairs and the shelter down), the service continued without interruption and most of us continued focusing on that.

While there are no reports of damage to buildings or people, thousands of dunams were torched, including forests and agricultural lands.