‘Everything is gone’: Deadly Iranian strike on Beit Shemesh leaves residents reeling

Nine people are killed and dozens are wounded in city after a ballistic missile brings chaos and destruction to a quiet residential street

BEIT SHEMESH — “We were in the safe room and suddenly we heard a massive blast and saw shrapnel inside the house,” Yarin said, standing in the middle of a previously quiet street now strewn with broken glass and shattered lengths of metal.

Speaking with The Times of Israel, the Beit Shemesh resident described the moment that an Iranian missile, having evaded air defenses, struck his neighborhood in this central Israeli city, killing nine people and injuring dozens of others, destroying a synagogue, and causing extensive damage to a public bomb shelter and surrounding homes.

“All the walls shattered, glass, all the drywall, the front door came apart,” he said.

The missile impact in Beit Shemesh was the deadliest in Israel during the current conflict with Iran. During the 12-day war with Iran in June 2025, the deadliest strike in Israel also killed nine people, when a missile struck a Bat Yam apartment building.

Away from the site of the attack, life appeared to be going on as normal in Beit Shemesh on Sunday, with children walking in costumes ahead of the Purim holiday and many stores operating despite Homefront Command guidelines mandating the shuttering of schools and nonessential businesses.

Approaching the site of the strike, however, the atmosphere quickly changed, with dust filling the air and helicopters and drones circling overhead. Glass crunched underfoot and large chunks of concrete and twisted scraps of metal blocked the sidewalks.

The windshields of cars parked along the street were either shattered or completely missing. Houses were increasingly damaged nearer the epicenter of the blast, with many missing large chunks of their roofs, the tiles blown off by the force of the blast.

As residents wandered around in shock, many of them still wearing pajamas, police, paramedics and IDF Homefront Command troops swarmed over the damaged and destroyed homes, spraying signs next to the doors to update other rescue workers as to what they could expect to find inside — a sight reminiscent of the state of Gaza border communities in the wake of the October 7, 2023, terror onslaught.

Watching the scene were several older women sitting at a bus stop, wrapped in blankets and surrounded by luggage, waiting to be evacuated. Down the block, municipal workers were busy setting up an ad hoc relocation center in a tent.

Across the street, an elderly man stood outside the ruins of his home, a hastily applied bandage leaking blood onto the cuff of his long-sleeved white undershirt.

Approached by this reporter, the man, who identified himself as Yaakov, dismissed his own injuries but expressed great concern over his home and wife.

“Everything is gone, everything is gone. You can’t [even] go inside,” he said, as a woman in IDF fatigues ran up.

“Dad? Dad! What’s going on? Where’s Mom?” the woman shouted, before requesting that this reporter watch over her father while she searched for her mother. His wife was in the safe room, he said, as she turned to enter the house.

After seating the man on a bench, an ultra-Orthodox medic with a long white beard took this reporter aside and said that the man’s wife was likely dead, as they had found several bodies in his home. First responders were holding off on informing Yaakov until a dedicated psycho-trauma team could arrive and deal with the matter.

Walking down the street nearby, a ZAKA volunteer carried a bucket and supplies, apparently in order to help with the effort to collect the bodies and body parts of the victims in order to give them a proper burial.

“We arrived here, and there was extensive destruction. Several buildings suffered direct hits. Additionally, all the nearby streets have blast and shrapnel damage. There is a lot of commotion, a lot of panic,” Magen David Adom medic Eli Eisenbach said.

Standing next to one of several ambulances parked on the street, Eisenbach said that it was unclear how high the death toll could rise.

“Searches are being conducted in all the impact sites, and they are still bringing more casualties out to us,” he said.