‘A huge boom’: Residents near IDF base shaken by deadly Hezbollah drone attack
A day after 4 soldiers killed in strike, resident of nearby Kafr Qara asks how terror group knew about the base, and ‘what if next time they fire and are slightly off target?’
Israelis living near an Israel Defense Forces base hit by a deadly Hezbollah drone strike on Sunday were shaken by the sound of the loud explosion, then of multiple ambulances arriving, sending fears soaring during an already tense period.
Four Israeli soldiers, all 19, were killed Sunday night by a drone at the Golani training base near Binyamina in north-central Israel — the deadliest strike on Israeli soil since the war between Israel and the Lebanese terror group intensified last month.
A further 58 soldiers were wounded in the attack, with 40 still hospitalized as of Monday morning. An official investigation found that the explosive-laden drone hit the base while soldiers were eating dinner.
“Last night was crazy,” Yousef, the manager of a restaurant in the nearby village of Kafr Qara, told AFP, declining to give his full name for safety reasons. “There was a huge boom and then suddenly ambulances started driving past, first one, then two, then three and more and more.”
“There were so many police cars and paramedics,” he added.
Yousef said that at first he thought the explosion was related to organized crime, which is high in some Arab Israeli villages. But he soon realized that the boom was from the nearby army base, less than a mile away from his restaurant.
“We’ve been open here for two years and didn’t realize that we were next to such an important base,” Yousef told AFP. “How did Hezbollah know it was here?”
“Now they know where that base is, what if next time they fire and are slightly off target?”
The village sits along one of the main thoroughfares to the base, and other witnesses described seeing ambulances and private cars whisking away dozens of injured soldiers Sunday night. According to residents interviewed by AFP, there were no sirens or advance warning of an incoming drone.
The IDF has pledged a full investigation into the incident.
Visiting the base on Monday morning, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed Israel would learn the lessons from the previous night’s strike.
“This is a difficult event with painful results,” he said to Golani officers who were present at the strike. “We must investigate it, study the details and assimilate the lessons in a quick and professional manner. Faced with the threat of UAVs, we are concentrating a national effort and are engaged in developing solutions that will help deal with the threat,” Gallant declared while surveying the damage to the dining hall.
On Kibbutz Regavim, a few kilometers from the base, residents said they did not hear the explosion but recognized that it was nearby from television images.
“The kibbutz’s security team was immediately alerted,” Eyal Nabet, a resident of the kibbutz, told AFP. “Sadly, afterwards, we heard the ambulances and helicopters heading to and from the base.”
Nabet said the residents of the kibbutz were shaken, but bomb shelters had been renovated recently and new concrete structures added, giving people “the feeling they are secure and someone is watching out for us.”
Following the strike, Hezbollah threatened to continue targeting Israel with more attacks if the IDF ground operation in Lebanon is not stopped. The Iran-backed terror group claimed the strike was “nothing compared to what awaits.”
Hezbollah has been regularly firing rockets, drones and missiles into Israel for more than a year, but the salvos have begun to reach further into Israel since September 23, when the war escalated.
Israel’s sophisticated air defenses have intercepted most of the projectiles, with relatively few casualties caused by the barrages or the subsequent falling debris, though more than 70 people in Israel have been killed along or near the northern border over the past year.
For those near the Golani base that was hit by the Hezbollah drone, a feeling of helplessness is palpable.
“What can we do?” asked a proprietor of a kiosk at the entrance to Kafr Qara, who did not provide her name for security reasons. “We are afraid but there is nothing we can do about it.”