Journalist Shanna Fuld lost everything when a ballistic missile struck her Tel Aviv apartment last week. Today, she says she is trying to look at it with a perspective of “genuine appreciation, gratefulness, and positivity.”
“I know that that sounds so silly and fake,” she told ILTV News on a recent podcast. “But there have been so many little nuggets along the way, these things that happened that I was so grateful for—even recovering my laptop, even having a moment with my therapist where she informed me that people that got into the safe room were protected. Those little things saved my life and gave me hope.”
Fuld would have been killed instantly if she had not run upstairs to her neighbor’s safe room. The ballistic missiles launched by Iran—with their massive warheads—are causing unprecedented destruction across the country and have already killed two dozen people. According to the Home Front Command, anyone not in a safe room when a missile falls nearby is unlikely to survive. So far, with the exception of a small group in Petah Tikvah whose safe room wall was directly hit, all those killed were outside.
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Fuld’s apartment was struck overnight, around 4 a.m. between Sunday and Monday.
“The apartment building shook and swayed, and I was working because I'm a journalist,” she recalled. “I had been working all night. Saturday evening into Sunday was go time for me, because the Iranian attacks really began on Friday evening, and I'm a Sabbath-observing Jew, so I didn't really kick into high gear until Saturday night. By Sunday afternoon, I was already covering the Bat Yam missile strike and had been spending the afternoon there, which meant that my coverage was skewed late into the evening. I put together a really extensive podcast. I worked all night editing it. I hit the publish button around 3:50 a.m. That’s when I sat on my bed and kind of put my guard down.”
Minutes later, the siren rang.
Fuld was in the process of changing into her pajamas. She threw them on and ran up five flights of stairs in her sandals to a neighbor’s home, where the family had offered her use of their safe room. Fuld does not have a safe room in her own apartment.
From inside the shelter, she said, she knew something terrible had happened.
“I think it's so important for us as humans to realize that we're animals in a way, and we can sense danger and we can feel things,” Fuld told ILTV. “I felt that there was danger, and I could feel the rocket whiz by the apartment. I heard the whipping, and I felt the power—I don't know how else to describe it—but the power of the missile coming down outside. I heard the wind whipping, and then we heard a boom that was the loudest boom that I have heard since this ordeal began on Friday evening. That boom was so loud, the building swayed and came back into place.”
Fuld said she had a deep sense of faith and trust that the building would hold and that she would survive. About an hour later, police came to evacuate her. Almost everything was destroyed.
“There are some things that were so blown to smithereens that I did not see them anymore—a wooden chair, bed, sheets, bags of clothes,” Fuld said. “There were things that were just kind of vaporized.”
Today, Fuld is living in a temporary apartment and trying to figure out her next steps. She is also continuing her work as a journalist.
“To support the State of Israel, you need to share information that is true, using facts; leave the emotion to the side,” Fuld said. “People can't really seem to deal with the emotion. Facts, numbers and statistics will really put things in perspective and make things clear.”
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Podcast 21.06.2025
(ILTV)
