A little after midday the sirens sounded here Tuesday, a chilling wail echoing through the empty streets of a neighborhood by the sea, warning of more rockets on the way.
A few people caught on the sidewalk ducked into the stairwell of a house, others went down the stairs of a bomb shelter, bracing for an impact, somewhere.
After a nerve-jangling minute, a few booms were heard in the distance. This time the neighborhood, where a house took a direct hit Monday, was spared.
Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city, with a busy port, gleaming high-tech office park and sprawling malls on the flanks of Mt. Carmel, has become a front line in the raging war between Israel and Hezbollah.
Rockets fired daily by Hezbollah militants at towns across northern Israel are hitting Haifa and its suburbs, about 20 miles from the Lebanese border, forcing the closing of the port and shuttering shops and restaurants across town.
More rockets land Tuesday
On Sunday, eight workers in a train maintenance depot were killed when a rocket blasted through the roof. Another rocket landed there Tuesday, this time causing no casualties.
Many of Haifa’s 270,000 residents have left to stay with relatives in safer places, but others have stayed put, hunkering down in their homes and in bombproof rooms and shelters, insisting that they are ready to put up with the rockets as long as it takes for the Israeli army to smash Hezbollah.
In a sign of defiance, someone stuck an Israeli flag in the sagging rubble of the three-story apartment house that collapsed when a rocket smashed into its upper story Monday.
Surveying the damage, Mira Karasanti, 39, gazed at what remained of the home where she had grown up, where her 70-year-old mother was rescued with a broken collarbone after she took shelter in a bathroom when the sirens went off. Collapsing concrete formed a wedge over where she stood, and she survived.
“Someone was watching over her,” Karasanti said.
Yaffa Amir, 55, a nurse who lives nearby, said she stays in her second-story walkup when the sirens go off, because she figures it is better to be on top of the rubble than beneath it if a rocket should hit.
Because the rockets come from the north, Amir takes shelter in a room on the southern side of her apartment that is protected by a foundation wall of reinforced concrete.
“What will happen will happen; it is fate, but I have to be here and help others as much as possible,” said Amir, who has trained in her hospital to respond to mass casualties from an attack on Haifa’s oil refineries and petrochemical plants, a target Hezbollah has warned it could hit.
Taking cover in a stairwell with her daughter as the sirens sounded, Ila Wolfman, 69, said she supports the Israeli offensive against Hezbollah even though it brought rockets to her city.
“We’re ready to suffer a little more so that this will be finished for good,” Wolfman said.
Her daughter, Bella Mizrahi, 31, was on a cell phone, getting reports of where the rockets had landed.
She had left her home in Nahariya, a town to the north, after it was hit by rockets, and gone to Tiberias, a town further south. But it too was hit, so she joined her mother in Haifa, which also has come under attack.
“Better for this to happen now than in a few years’ time, because then Hezbollah would have been even stronger,” Mizrahi said. “We have to finish them off once and for all. I hope it ends quickly.”
At the entrance to an apartment house, a few steps from a bomb shelter, Jacqueline Cohen, 48, sat with neighbors and their children at a makeshift lunch table, celebrating her birthday.
The covered entrance area has become an impromptu gathering place for the families, who share meals and go to the shelter when the sirens go off. Nights also are spent in the shelter, with some people sleeping in a first-floor apartment because of lack of space.
Cohen said she was ready to cope with danger and discomfort so the military campaign could go on.
`It is worth the price’
“Let them get the job done,” she said. “It is worth the price. Hezbollah should not be on the border fence, they shouldn’t have rockets and they shouldn’t abduct our soldiers–nothing. That’s what I want: quiet. We’re not even talking about peace.”
Ilana Almakis, 46, was preparing to leave town with her children, traveling to stay with relatives near Tel Aviv.
“We want the kids to get some fresh air, to change the atmosphere,” she said.
Her sister, Liora Biton, 39, was leaving, in tears, with her young daughter, unsettled by the days of tension.
Orly Livneh, 36, said she isn’t going anywhere.
“It’s really very scary,” she said. “But we’ll get through it.”
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jogreenberg@tribune.com
