New Year's in Beersheva

Even inside a bomb shelter, the missiles are loud.

by Neal Ungerleider

There are two things about air raid sirens that you don't learn until after the fact. The first is that they are deafeningly loud and cannot be missed. The second is that sometimes they fail to go off.

That was the lesson that residents of Beersheva, Israel, learned on New Year's Eve.

A few years ago, I was a journalism student at Temple University. I left Philly to work in New York and am now working on an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva. These days I'm an impromptu refugee in Tel Aviv, waiting for my university to reopen its doors after coming under missile attack. 

Beersheva is a working-class town of about 200,000 located on the edge of the Negev Desert, 25 miles from Gaza. Apart from the university, the city is mostly a mix of Russians, Yemenis, Ethiopians, Moroccans and Bedouins. Many residents are recent immigrants to Israel whose Hebrew is less than perfect.

Our first missile attack occurred on the evening of Tue., Dec. 30. Air raid sirens started blaring and the residents of my building ran towards our bomb shelter (which nearly all houses are built with here). Although air raid sirens are hypothetically supposed to give 45 seconds' warning, we heard the missile make contact about 15 seconds after the siren went off.

It turns out that a kindergarten across town sustained a direct hit. It was nighttime, though — not school hours.

I had made it to my shelter in time. The residents of the apartment buildings across our courtyard were not so lucky — their shelter door was padlocked shut. The sound of ambulances filled the street a few minutes later.

The next morning, air raid sirens went off again. Again we got to the shelter in time, but a few seconds later heard an audible boom — loud and clear despite the multiple layers of fortified concrete over our heads.

A Grad missile had hit a street about 700 meters away, in one of Beersheva's poorest neighborhoods, where the city had routinely neglected to maintain shelters and entrances were rusted shut or filled with urine and waste.

After that, the sirens gave out. A friend's roommate brought out a small radio, and over the next few hours, the local radio station announced that we were under air raid warnings multiple times. These warnings contained no sirens or alarm sounds of any kind — just a male voice announcing that there was a raid, in Hebrew, which many residents didn't understand.

Like little kids, we hid under desks because the nearest bomb shelter was too far away. Luckily, the rockets all hit the desert on the city's outskirts.

Then the exodus happened. The Israeli military had taken control of workplace and school openings and closings in a quasi-martial-law situation, and our university was closed for the week. Two of my roommates decided to stay with their families in the coastal city of Ashdod (which remains under even more severe missile attack at press time) and another stayed with friends in Jerusalem. 

I was lucky enough to have distant relatives and friends in Tel Aviv who could put me up until the city became safer. When I arrived here, I found many inhabitants celebrating New Year's Eve as if there were no war 50 miles from their front door. But in Beersheva, with no stores open to purchase radios, the remaining residents' only option was to pray the air raid sirens blared and that they would have enough time to run to a shelter before shrapnel from a Katyusha or Qassam rocket tore them to bits.

The situation in Gaza is even worse. Civilians are regularly getting caught in the battles between Hamas and the Israeli army. Soldiers on both sides are young kids who would be in college if they were Americans. Babies are dying because they have the bad luck to live next door to Hamas members. The scene, no matter how you look at it, is bad.

It's been a few days now. When I returned to Beersheva to get some personal effects, I found a ghost town. Nearly all workplaces and stores remained closed, and many residents had fled. The street outside my apartment building had a few stray Yemeni and Moroccan retirees chain-smoking outside their shelters, and little else. Palestinian civilians from the Gaza Strip were being helicoptered in to the local hospital for burn-wound treatment; the same hospital is treating Russians from Ashkelon and Bedouins from the desert for shrapnel wounds. A full-on war is raging a half hour's drive away. I packed up clothing for a few days more, and hoped the air raid siren wouldn't sound during the walk to the train station.

Life goes on.

Neal Ungerleider is a former Temple journalism student, studying at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva. He can be reached at neal.ungerleider@gmail.com.