Deadly Iranian missile ‘brought out the hatred’ inside Israel, Tamra residents say
Coexistence tested after video shows Jewish Israeli man cheering projectile that killed four in the Arab Israeli community near Haifa
Reporter at The Times of Israel
TAMRA, northern Israel — Doaa Hmade, 24, a volunteer with the Home Front Command, stood on the street in the Arab Israeli city of Tamra, 27 kilometers (17 miles) from Haifa, on Sunday hours after a ballistic missile scored a direct hit on a house there.
Manar Khatib and her two daughters, Hala, 20, and Shada, 13, were killed in the attack, along with another relative, Manar Khatib.
“This is our neighborhood,” Hmade told The Times of Israel as she looked around, trying to take in the destruction in the quiet, residential section of the mostly Muslim town of 37,000.
Everywhere were shattered cars, rubble, and strewn glass. Workers were trying to restore electricity and clean up the debris.
When Hmade’s family heard the sirens in the middle of the night, she said they gathered in the safe room of their house and waited.
“Then we heard the booms,” she said. “It felt really close.”
When she walked outside, there was no electricity and no internet, but “I saw blood.”
She said there was a protected room in the Khatib family house, “but it was a direct hit.”
“How could a protected room help?” she said.
The women’s funerals have not yet been scheduled, and the bodies are still at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa.
The missile ‘brought out the hatred’
“The missiles don’t differentiate between sects and religions,” said a town resident, Jabar, who asked that his last name not be used. “The Iranians are Shiite and we’re Sunni.”
During the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, he said, Hezbollah-fired rockets from Lebanon landed in his field, killing his horse.
What disturbed town residents the most, Jabar said, was that “the missile brought out the hatred.”
He said that when rockets were fired on nearby towns during the Hezbollah-Israel war, people from Tamra went to help the Jewish residents.
The street where an Iranian ballistics missile landed in Tamra, killing four women on June 15, 2025. (Diana Bletter/Times of Israel)
But soon after Sunday’s missile attack, he noted, there was a social media post showing people singing and saying that Tamra “should burn.'”
The video was attributed to people in nearby Mitzpe Aviv, 5.5 kilometers (3.4 miles) away. But Ron Shani, the head of the community, wrote on Facebook that the video was not filmed in his moshav.
“We don’t have tall buildings and a view like that,” Shani said, adding that he had spoken to Moussa Abu Roumi, the Tamra mayor, conveying condolences and sympathy, and offering assistance.
“We do not know who distributed the video, and we condemn it in the strongest terms,” Shani said.
Other videos on social media have shown Arab Israelis cheering at the sight of missiles heading toward Jewish population centers.
Hisham Diab, 50, who also belongs to the Home Front Command patrol group, said he is a member of Mosaica, a national group that helps build bridges among Israelis.
“It’s so important to work on coexistence,” Diab said in between helping Israel Electric Corporation workers.
“We want peace. I’ve lived in Tamra for more than 40 years and I never heard of any antisemitism. I never heard anything about people not wanting to be part of Israel.”
Diab said that Arab citizens have “decided to be citizens of this country but the government doesn’t always see us as citizens.”
The Times of Israel Community.