Israeli rescue workers on Monday recovered the last of four bodies that were trapped overnight in the ruins of a residential building in the northern Israeli port city of Haifa, a full 18 hours after an Iranian missile crashed into it.
Israel’s air defense forces attempted to intercept the missile on Sunday evening, according to the Israeli military. At least part of the missile hit a terraced apartment building in the Vardiya neighborhood, on the upper slopes of Haifa’s iconic Mount Carmel, officials said.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps claimed in a statement carried by state media that Iranian forces had targeted an oil refinery in Haifa on Sunday, but it did not mention the residential building.
Erez Geller, the director for Magen David Adom, Israel’s ambulance service, for Haifa and its surrounding areas, was among the first to arrive on the scene.
“Part of the building remained intact, and part had collapsed into a hollow,” he said on Monday, speaking by phone from the site of the strike. “It looked like there had been an earthquake.”
The missile’s warhead did not explode, Mr. Geller said, preventing a much larger disaster.
Mr. Geller described how rescue workers removed stones and concrete blocks with their bare hands to rescue a man in his 80s who was conscious but severely wounded. He said a baby suffered a minor injury in the strike.
The four victims — an older couple, their son and his partner — were residents of the building that was struck, but unlike most of their neighbors they had not taken cover in the nearest bomb shelter.
The search for the victims’ bodies went on through the night. Two of them were found early Monday morning, then a third, then the fourth.
Read more on The New York Times>>
