For some Israeli couples, Gaza rocket fire rains on their wedding day
IDF Home Front bans large gatherings, prompting some wedding halls in south and central Israel to cancel; several find last minute small venues to tie the knot
Israeli couples were forced to call off weddings scheduled for Tuesday evening due to the latest round of fighting between Israel and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group in Gaza.
More than 190 rockets have been fired from Gaza since Tuesday morning, leading to the closure of schools and non-essential businesses from the Gaza periphery to the Dan region, including Tel Aviv. In the Dan and Yarkon regions, the military prohibited all public gatherings of more than 300 people, while in other southern regions the number was as low as 100.
As a result, a number of planned events were called off.
“Right now the hall is not ready to hold the wedding and we don’t have anywhere to get married,” Netanel Abergil, who was slated to get married in Netivot, told Channel 13. “We canceled the photos, everything is canceled.”
He said his fiancee and her family were “really crying” and that he didn’t want “the happiest day of my life” to “become a sad and unfortunate day.”
Natalie Avital and Gil Cohen told Channel 13 that they also had to postpone their wedding in Beersheba in order to comply with Home Front Command instructions about large gatherings.
Shmuel Trosman and Sapir Asraf, on the other hand, told the television network they were able to find a new wedding hall at the last minute after their chosen venue canceled on them.
“We got up in the morning for a normal day, we were sure everything was going to work normally until we started getting red alert notifications from the app,” Trosman said, referring to the rocket siren warnings.
“Its not like we imagined the event to be but the main thing is that we found a solution and everything is okay,” Sapir commented.
Previous rounds of fighting between Israel, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have also disrupted weddings in Israel. In 2018, Yael and Raziel Huri held their wedding in the town of Ofakim, 20 kilometers from the Strip, despite Hamas rocket fire.
In 2014, a rocket hit near a wedding in Ashdod, forcing participants to flee, and in 2012 a wedding celebration in Ashkelon was accompanied by the whine and thud of falling Grad rockets from Gaza, but revelers refused to give in to the terror threat and celebrated with the happy couple.
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