Scenes from the Aftermath of the Beit Shemesh Strike
BEIT SHEMESH, Israel — The explosion took my breath away.
I was running toward the bomb shelter in my moshav, about 10 minutes outside Beit Shemesh, when the Iranian ballistic missile struck earlier this March. The impact was so powerful that the air around me seemed to vibrate. My ears popped and the ground trembled beneath my feet.
Minutes later, Telegram channels confirmed what we had already heard: a missile had hit the city directly.
By the time I reached Beit Shemesh the next day, the scale of the destruction had begun to settle into view. The missile had directly struck an underground shelter beneath Beit Knesset Tiferet Yisrael, the neighborhood’s Sephardic synagogue, collapsing the roof of the bunker below. Nine people were killed and more than 30 others hospitalized, according to emergency services.
The street looked as if a storm had torn through it.
Burned cars stood blackened by the road. Windows were shattered across nearby buildings. Household items, holy books, and pieces of furniture were scattered across the ground, blown out of homes and the synagogue by the force of the blast. The smell of fuel and burning filled the air.
The synagogue was all but rubble.
A pair of tefillin lay on the ground among scattered family photos.
Some friends and family of the victims moved slowly through the debris, some searching for belongings, others simply staring in shock at what remained of their neighbors’ homes.
Nearby, three teenagers searched through the debris, shouting when they uncovered photographs of their friend Roni with her family. Roni and several of her relatives had been injured in the missile strike and were hospitalized, they said. Her father had been killed.
I descended into the caved-in bomb shelter. Moments later, another missile alert sounded. People around the disaster site instinctively ran toward nearby buildings and shelters— a reflex familiar across much of Israel.
Weeks after the strike, investigators are still assessing how the missile bypassed Israel’s air defense systems as residents continue clearing debris from the surrounding buildings. Weeks later, the quiet neighborhood is still marked by the blast.
