What the Iranian missiles are doing to Israel (Noam Shelef - June 16, 2025)
Noam Shelef (he/him) joined New Jewish Narrative in 2025 as the Vice President of Communications. The issues that NJN champions have always been close to his heart, and he began his career in 1997 as an intern for Americans for Peace Now. In the years since, Noam has advocated in support of progressive causes in Israel, fighting for LGBTQ rights, and to end practices harmful to girls in Africa.
It has been four days since the Israeli government started bombing targets in Iran, prompting Iranian ballistic missile attacks, and opening up a new war.
Israelis have never lived through this type of war before. Israel’s missile defense system is able to intercept more than 90% of the missiles that Iran is launching, but those that penetrate are doing tremendous damage. This morning’s attack killed at least eight people, bringing the death toll in Israel to 24 with more than 500 injured. We’ve all seen the photos of entire buildings destroyed. On the morning radio shows there is talk about how the damage from the shock wave extends blocks in every direction—with damage to vehicles and more buildings, some of which are now clearly uninhabitable.
In 2024, there were two rounds of Iranian ballistic missile attacks at Israel, in April and in October. After each, Israeli spokespersons and the talking heads of the Israeli mainstream media boasted about how little impact the missiles had. They made out the Iranian missile threat to be a paper tiger.
But after the attack in October, I felt very differently: One of the missiles hit an empty school in the city of Gedera. I know exactly where that school is. My grandparents’ farm, the site of so many of my childhood memories, is only a couple of miles south. And Gedera is no longer the same sleepy town it was in my childhood. Its population mushroomed with the construction of new densely populated neighborhoods. In the October attack, I saw just how lucky Israel got. The school happened to be empty because the attack struck outside of school hours. Had the missile veered a hundred meters, it would have hit some of those new apartment buildings. However capable Israel’s missile defense system was, it had allowed a missile to slip by and land in an urban area.
That apprehension came back to me on Friday. A colleague told me that the Kirya, the IDF’s headquarters in downtown Tel Aviv, had been hit. It would be hours more before I saw the video footage in slow motion and could see a missile go down near the iconic Marganit Tower at the center of the Kirya. Did the missile land inside the grounds of the military base? Or was it just outside? I couldn’t quite tell. I also knew that Israel’s censor would not allow details of the strike to be reported by the press. All I had access to was social media rumors. This is the fog of war.
On the news broadcasts, as the television and radio hosts try to fill the time, a new mantra has emerged, “Shelters save lives.” We are told once and again how important it is to be in a bomb shelter or safe room that meets the building codes. If one is not available, then we go to a staircase or an interior room. It’s never safe to shelter in a bathroom. The tiles can explode from the pressure. But are the shelters really safe? An expert comes on the air to answer. There are no guarantees, he says. But none of the bombing casualties in Israel’s history were killed in a shelter. It’s the best choice Israelis have. Shelters save lives.
Buildings constructed in recent decades have safe rooms. The buildings that were new when I was a kid have bomb shelters, usually in the basement. But older buildings might have no shelters at all. In those cases, time permitting, Israelis are told to find a public bomb shelter.
For Jewish Israelis the lack of shelters within buildings is a particular problem in cities like Tel Aviv with older buildings. But it’s a far bigger problem for Palestinian citizens of Israel. On October 7, and during the war that followed, we saw how the Bedouin towns in the area around Gaza did not have any safe spaces. There was a mobilization after October 7, with the help of groups like the New Israel Fund, to create temporary shelters so that the residents would have some place to go when rockets were fired. It’s a Band-Aid. Decades of discrimination have created enormous disparities between Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel.
The scale of the problem is on display now. On Saturday night a missile from Iran struck in Tamra, an Arab village near Haifa. Only 40% of Tamra’s 37,000 residents have either a safe room or a shelter, according to the town’s mayor. I’ve seen entrances to public bomb shelters across Israel. But those are rare in Arab cities and towns. There are none in Tamra. When the Iranian missile hit the Khatib home, it killed four: Manar Khatib, a teacher, her two daughters, Shatha and Hala, and her sister-in-law, Manar Diab. Manar Khatib’s husband, Raja, and their youngest daughter, Razan, survived.
This is a war that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose to start now. The political analyst in me knows that he saw a moment of opportunity marked by Iran’s loss of proxies in Hezbollah and the Syrian regime, weakened Iranian air defenses, and the lack of progress in the Trump administration’s negotiations with Iran. I see too the domestic benefits for the prime minister in terms of stalling his criminal trial, holding his coalition together, and changing the narrative.
How long will this war go on? How much damage will be done to the Israel I know? How many lives will be lost both in Israel and Iran? Can Iran’s nuclear program really be stopped by military force? Is regime change in Iran just another neocon fever dream? These are the questions all of us are asking. I pray that an end will come soon, but I think that it will take some time for us to find our way through this.