‘I imagine I’m going to die soon’: May Dohand one of many Israelis’ gripped by fear as war breaks out
One woman from Tel Aviv who speaks for many Israelis says she is sleep deprived and traumatised as air raid sirens don’t stop sounding across the capital warning of constant danger.
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Each time the sirens sound across Tel Aviv warning of an incoming barrage of Iranian rockets, May Dohand is gripped by the crippling fear she will soon be dead.
The 26-year-old Israeli woman cheated death just days ago when a Tehranian missile flattened the apartment building next to hers, killing nine of her neighbours.
The image of babies screaming in the rubble, the terrified children covered in blood and shards of glass and adults fainting in shock will never leave her.
There is nothing left of the four-bedroom home in Bat Yam, south of Tel Aviv, where she lived and ran her small beauty business offering facials.
All she has left are the clothes she was wearing, her mobile phone and her handbag.
She is now living in a hotel in Tel Aviv while she works out how to pick up the pieces of her life and as her country trades increasingly deadly rocket fire with Iran.
Sleep is hard to come by as she lies awake each night waiting for the sirens that announce another wave of carnage.
“I feel like I need to be awake, the shelter here at the hotel is downstairs and you need to go downstairs three levels, so I can’t go to sleep,” she said.
“Right now when there’s sirens I feel like I’m losing my mind, I imagine I’m going to die soon.”
Ms Dohand was sheltering underground last weekend when the missile hit her apartment building.
“It was terrifying, kids came in covered in blood and glass, people were fainting next to me,” she told this masthead.
“All my house was destroyed and people were screaming for help covered in blood and running in the streets, kids, babies, it was terrifying.”
For the 10 million people who call Israel home, their future is increasingly uncertain as the war with Iran escalates and threatens to turn into a wider regional conflict.
“We are praying for the best,” Ms Dohand said, fighting back tears.
“I think I’m still traumatised by the things that I saw, especially the babies and kids and the innocent people that were killed”.
At this time of year, the thriving coastal metropolis of Tel Aviv would ordinarily be abuzz with life as people took advantage of the perfect summer weather.
But the city is a ghost town. Residents are hesitant to stray too far from the bomb shelters with warnings only allowing a few minutes to seek cover each time missiles are fired in their direction.
Many restaurants and shops are closed and the people who are out are alert and on edge, deeply attuned to any noise and startling at the sound of a car horn or ambulance siren.
Despite the risk, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel said while many Australians are trying to flee the country, more than 150,000 Israelis are trying to return home.
“We’ve been trying to keep the safety of the people who are coming in and out of Israel to make sure that we don’t put them at risk,” she said.
“We have around 150,000 Israelis who are desperate and want to come home as quickly as possible. We have more people trying to come into Israel than people who are trying to leave”.
In the past two days Israel has started to allow rescue flights on Israeli airlines Arkia, Israir and El Al back into Ben Gurion Airport to bring home Israelis as well as boats with citizens while others are coming through the land border crossing in Egypt and Jordan.
Ms Haskel described the ballistic missile threats at Israel as a “very serious situation” and she warned of the dangers of the nuclear threat from Iran.
“That could end with hundreds of thousands of dead civilians, Iran is targeting civilian populations, hospitals on purpose, this is their goal … whereas Israel is only targeting nuclear military regime facilities and leadership,” she claimed.
“We are capable, we have a bank of targets to take and retract (Iran backwards) to make sure that we damage their nuclear military program and their ballistic missile program severely and we will not stop until we finish those banks of targets.”
One of Israel’s biggest hospitals was bombed on Thursday after the country’s Iron Dome defence system was unable to repel an Iranian rocket.
Thousands of people had already been evacuated from the Soroka facility but 40 people were injured in the direct strike.
Boris Knaizer, who heads the ophthalmology department, was at a loss as to how the 50,000 patients treated in his unit each year would get the help they needed.
“And now, how are we going to receive them?” he told AFP.
“We have no idea, we have no space, we have no rooms, everything has been destroyed.”
His colleague Wasim Hin echoed his thoughts: “It’s so sad, I never thought something like this could happen. Never. It’s only medical professionals here, and patients … and look what happened to us,” he said.
The blast site was visited by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who warned Iran would “pay a heavy price” for the devastating attack.
Just how heavy a price remains to be seen as Donald Trump continues to weigh up joining Israel’s assault on Iran that risks drawing the United States into a costly and deadly conflict that could provoke retaliation from Tehran and its allies.
Mr Trump said he would make a final decision on whether to strike within the next two weeks, hoping Iran would still come to the negotiation table to abandon its uranium enrichment program that would allow them to produce nuclear weapons.
But regardless of whether America joins the fight, the deadly conflict between Iran and Israel is likely to rage for a long while to come.
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Originally published as ‘I imagine I’m going to die soon’: May Dohand one of many Israelis’ gripped by fear as war breaks out
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