Iran’s nightly attacks have upended life for many Israelis. Among them is Lucy, a British-Israeli new immigrant whose Tel Aviv apartment was destroyed by a ballistic missile – and whose interview with The Jerusalem Post was later interrupted by another one.
Lucy moved to Israel four years ago, originally arriving for a course at Tel Aviv University – but staying after falling in love just two days into her degree. Since then, she has weathered challenges and traumas “like a true Israeli,” and now describes life under a multifront war as a kind of “cultural ulpan.”
After living in the country during one of the worst massacres to have been endured by the Jewish people in the last century, October 7, Lucy knew that she did not want to stay in Tel Aviv when Tehran attacked. She packed her bags and moved to a moshav in central Israel, into the home of her boyfriend’s family.
“It was just a very [strong] gut feeling that I had,” Lucy said, speaking of her instinctual need to move from the apartment. “And also on October 7, my refuge was the moshav, so I felt like that was where I wanted to be.
“When I left the apartment, I said to my boyfriend, ‘I feel like we have to close the safe room door,’ and it was a very visceral feeling that I felt. Even though we were leaving the apartment, I felt like I needed to close them on my door,” she recalled.
As Tehran’s missiles rained down on Israel on June 16, she thought only of the direct hit in Petah Tikva – a city painfully close to where she was staying. When the sirens finally subsided and she could exit the safe room, she was met with a news broadcast being filmed outside her Tel Aviv home. A ballistic missile had landed in the car park behind the apartment, but the impact shattered the glass in the building and destroyed its foundation.
She told the Post that as she watched the TV, a friend called her, and it was only the mix of visual and audible confirmation that helped her accept that difficult truth – her home and much of what she owned were gone.
“Nothing, no glass was intact, and it was complete destruction, and the infrastructure of the building collapsed. I’d never seen anything like it, like the vents came through, the elevator was just wide open, and it was crazy,” Lucy shared. “When you hear [about] the casualties, because it’s Israel, you feel every life lost deeply, but it’s still [distant]. When it’s someone’s home, it’s almost one degree of separation from you, but when you see on the news your own home, it was like a complete out-of-body experience for me.”
She watched videos of her downstairs neighbor and her little white dog being pulled from the wreckage, the fire outside her apartment building, and the broken glass blanketing the street.
It was the broken glass that stuck with Lucy, so much so that she shared her story in the Facebook community Belle Aviv, urging members to keep shoes in their safe rooms so they would not cut their feet while being rescued.
One in nine million
Despite initially feeling like “the unlucky ones... the one in nine million that it happens to,” Lucy’s Facebook post put her in contact with her neighbor, who helped put things in perspective. The neighbor told Lucy that she could still hear the explosion, and she was jealous that Lucy had walked away from the experience without having to go through that level of trauma, she explained.
Despite the level of destruction, her neighbors escaped with only light injuries, and few required hospital treatment. “It’s a total miracle because of the safe room,” she said.
Lucy’s partner was granted a few days’ leave from reserve duty to help Lucy pick up the pieces of their broken home. They visited the site once, hoping to collect a few valuable things that survived the explosion – a necklace left to Lucy by her grandmother and her passport.
Of particular concern, she said, was the recent looting which targeted homes hit by missiles.
“The looting was a big thing, because I didn’t even realize that that was a thing. I always thought like we’re all in this together, and no one would ever do that, but it does happen. And so I had a couple of friends kind of watch over the building, but there were so many people there,” Lucy shared. “Nothing was taken, but nothing prepared me for what I saw when I entered the apartment and the building.”
Despite being met with damage that exceeded her expectations, everything in her safe room survived the explosion. Her partner’s family, farmers, came with three vehicles and helped her salvage what they could.
“In my head, it was a case of: Okay, I’ve now gotta be super selective. I’m in this situation where we don’t have a lot of time, and a siren could even go off. So what’s important and what isn’t? What’s salvageable and what isn’t?” she shared, speaking on the difficulty of filtering all her possessions into such practical categories.
Lucy shared that she was especially grateful for her boyfriend’s family, as the visit to her former home had been emotionally taxing, and she spent much of it on the phone to her parents back in England, who plan to join her and her siblings in December.
As she carefully walked the floors of her building, she peeked into the homes of her neighbors, seeing some for the first time, only now that they were wrecked. She shared that in every apartment she was able to enter, the safe room was entirely intact.
THROUGHOUT HER conversation with the Post, Lucy spoke often about the absurdity of her situation. Born and raised in the North London suburbs, she had lived in the busy city of Tel Aviv ever since leaving the UK – and now, after losing her home to a ballistic missile launched by a hostile enemy nation, she was living on a farm. The contrast was difficult for many back home to comprehend, and something that created a greater emotional distance with the UK.
The latest trauma has prompted loved ones in both Israel and the UK to question Lucy when she will return to England, something she said isn’t in her plans, now that she is a “totally different human.”
London is “not my home. If I didn’t leave on October 7, and I didn’t leave when a missile hit my apartment, there’s no reason for that to push me out. [That] is such a bizarre thing to say,” she shared. “I’ve come to the conclusion that this is where my home is, and despite everything, what am I going to do in London? How do you explain to a British person that a ballistic missile fell on my apartment, and it’s destroyed, but I’m fine, and I’ve got such a good support system, we move on. They can’t relate. They don’t have this existential crisis. It’s a very complex feeling.
“I’m so far detached from my reality back in London now that, when I go home, I don’t connect with the people around me in the same way as I do here,” Lucy explained. “I’m so far gone with everything that’s happened that all these experiences have shaped me.”
October 7 and the war that followed, she said, taught her how to survive in extreme situations.
New immigrants “have a lot of identities here,” she said, “because you have a very complex Diaspora identity, plus this Israeli identity, and someone told me [that] even though you can’t speak Hebrew, you’ve had a cultural ulpan and you get a pass.”
After taking a two year reprieve from social media, following the lack of support she received following Hamas’s invasion, she made the decision to share the details of her “cultural ulpan” on Instagram. She lost 20 followers. Lucy said her former best friend at university broke through the years of silence, which first began with Hamas’s attacks, to express her sympathies over the apartment – a gesture Lucy has decided not to accept.
For her Jewish friends who stayed behind her, Lucy’s apartment was a “wake-up call,” bringing home the geographically distant issues being faced by many Israelis right now.
“Israel’s kind of far away from them.... Even though they have cousins and they have this and they have that [in Israel], their understanding is formed by their Diaspora experience,” Lucy shared. “They don’t have the same experience of missiles and bomb shelters and war. It’s close to them, but it’s [also] not; it doesn’t directly affect them in that visceral way that it affects us. But I think they’ve been so unbelievably shocked. I’ve had amazing support from them.”
For now, Lucy is rebuilding her life piece by piece and starting with her mental health. She still needs to contact the relevant government authorities to arrange the financial and bureaucratic matters to rebuild her life, but is confident that her boyfriend, his family, and the wider Belle Aviv community will provide the support she needs along the way.