A few hours after a rocket from Gaza had destroyed his home, Yoni Wolf looked at the ruins and said that the home had been “my parents' Zionist dream, but it will be rebuilt.”
Robert and Susan, who emigrated from London 30 years ago, built their home in Mishmeret, an agricultural community known as a moshav, between Netanya and Kfar Saba on Israel’s central coastal plain. This is where their children and grandchildren live as well.
“We live in Israel and I can’t say that I believed this would happen,” said Yoni, who runs a CrossFit training center in Mishmeret.
“But it’s always there. I’ve haven’t got a shred of desire for revenge, but the (government) policy isn’t working. I’m not saying what has to be done, but sanity must be restored.”
When the warning sirens went off at 5.20am, his brother Daniel was sleeping in the living room, where he says he had fallen asleep accidentally in the night.
“I heard the siren and I rushed to my wife and eldest daughter and ran them to the Mamad,” he said, using the Hebrew acronym for the reinforced shelter area which is in every Israeli home.
“I woke up my father and he ran to the other unit to wake my younger sister.”
Daniel was in the shelter with his wife and two daughters when the rocket fell.
Robert was outside at the other housing unit, trying to get his sister to shelter. He saw the rocket landing on his home.
Susan, a teacher at a school in Raanana, was on the way to the shelter from the kitchen when the rocket fell.
“There was a boom, then quiet and dust everywhere, and then screaming. It was terrible,” says Daniel.
“I got my wife and daughters out and then saw my mother lying there and I could see she was bleeding.
“I picked her up and just talked her until the ambulances arrived and took us all to hospital.”
Susan remains moderately wounded at Beilinson Hospital in Kfar Saba, while Robert, Daniel and Daniel’s two year-old daughter Tamara were released. Two other family members and a neighbour are still in hospital with minor injuries.
Returning to his house, Robert put up an Israeli flag over the ruins and said to the assembled media: “with all the games of politicians and all of them blowing out their chests and saying they’re all wonderful people and they’re all great people and they’re all going to save us, this is the real price.
“And I just paid it. And I nearly lost my family. And if we hadn’t got to the bomb shelter in time I would be burying all my family.
“That’s two nechadim, two grandchildren — one five months, one two years old. That’s my third child with his wife, my wife, myself and my daughter, my youngest daughter.
“They would all have been dead if we didn’t do what we were supposed to do.
“I want to say to everyone, when you hear the siren, get to the Mamad. It saved my family. That’s all.”
