Man seriously wounded in Akko; rocket barrage on Haifa

VIDEO - Shortly after 5 p.m. a rocket struck an apartment building in the Haifa area and ignited a fire, which was extingusihed by firefighters; six people were lightly hurt in the attack.

Police officer Ahuva Tomer said, “The rocket hit the building’s gas balloons and entered the structures bottom level. There was no siren – we look into it later.”

Shoshana Diamant, 60, whose apartment was damaged, said “All of the windows were shattered. There was destruction outside as well; a fire broke out, everything blew up.”

Firchah Sheetrit, whose home was also struck in the attack, said ‘whenever the siren goes off I get scared. I sit at my home all alone and my blood pressure rises; I haven’t been felling well for a few days now.”

Earlier one man was seriously injured after being hit by a rocket in Akko. In Kiryat Shmona two rockets directly hit houses. Two people were lightly wounded by shrapnel. A short while later three rocket landed in open fields near Tiberias; two people sustained light injuries.

Avi Feldheim, who works in Akko, told Ynet: "I heard a siren followed by two blasts. I saw smoke in one of the places in the city. Now the smoke has ascended, apparently a fire hasn't started there."

On Sunday morning, two people were killed and 17 were wounded after rockets hit several places in Haifa.

From the onset of the fighting in the north, 12 days ago, 37 Israelis have been killed.  

The rocket that hit the Ramot Yitzhak neighborhood in the Nesher suburb of Haifa penetrated directly into Zohar Bernstein's living room, and created a huge hole in the middle of her home. The hit caused structural damage to the apartment and caused the windows to break.

"We were in an inner room," Zohar said. "We purposely weren't in the fortified room, because it is actually on the outer side of the apartment. Thankfully, I wasn't injured. My son and I were in the apartment, but we got out without injuries. I didn't understand at first that the rocket had hit my home directly."

Damage caused by rocket in Nesher (Photo: Gilad Har Sheleg)

Bernstein was scared and upset and, in response to the question of whether he would remain in his home, he said: "Apparently not."

The apartment itself was completely wrecked. A security official who arrived at the apartment removed part of the rocket from the living room.

Deadly hit near Haifa

An employee of a carpentry shop near Haifa was killed after being directly hit by a rocket. The place suffered great damage. The other workers said that they had began running toward the reinforced room when the missiles began falling. Some of them failed to reach the room and were hurt by shrapnel. One worker was seriously injured and other were lightly hurt.

"We won’t let them break us. We will overcome and will be strong. At the end everything will be okay," the carpentry shop's owner told Ynet.

The shop owner was at the time of the hit in his office located on the second floor.

"We heard the siren, I yelled at everyone to run to the reinforced room. This is a 2,000-meter (6,562-feet) factory, everyone ran, and the worker who reached the entrance first was hit by the missile and was killed, apparently on the spot," he recounted.

The owner, whose four children work with him in the carpentry shop, began searching for them and for his workers.

"I began looking for everyone. My daughter was in shock and began crying. I understood I had an injured worker, and apart from that I saw the rest of the workers in shock but not hurt," he said.  

Carpentry shop hit in Kiryat Ata (Photo: Tzafrir Abayov)

The sales manager of an adjacent business heard the noise of the blast and hurried to the location to see if anyone was hurt.

"We wanted to return to our daily routines, but then I heard an explosion and I understood that a rocket had fallen five or six meters (16 or 19 miles) from me. Simultaneously, windows in my building began to explode. I ran in order to see if anyone was hurt and then I saw a man running outside with a stream of blood coming out of his ear. I hurried to him, stopped the blood flow and pressed down on his ear. I didn't let go until MDA arrived," he recounted. 

"The whole time, I tried to keep him awake: I tried to cheer him up, asked how old he was, if he was married. He said he was married, with children, and I told him that he had to hold on for their sake," he added.

Pursuant to the event, Kiryat Ata Mayor Yaakov Peretz said that he intends to reexamine the IDF Home Front Command's suggestion that city residents return to business as usual and, instead, recommend that only workers deemed critical by the local authorities continue to go to work.

"There's no reason for additional people to get hurt as they did today in Kiryat Ata and a week ago in the train depot," he said.

Raanan Ben-Zur, Sharon Roffe-Ofir and Neta Sela contributed to the report