Israeli couple Aviva Pertzov and Jeff Lederer have been putting off building a bomb shelter for years, but now that rockets are hitting their homes and the threat is increasing, they are finally fortifying their home.
Her house in Tel Mond, 30 minutes north of Tel Aviv, has a solid reinforced concrete room behind a wooden formwork – stable enough to protect her and her grandchildren from a serious explosion.
When finished, this “safe room” will have white-painted walls, a sofa, a tiled floor, and a single window with a heavy metal shutter clanking shut in front of it.
“In previous conflicts, whenever there was a moment when we thought maybe we should build a shelter at home, we always did nothing,” said Pertzov, a psychologist, at her home in central Israel.
“This time, when the attacks seemed to be getting closer to our area, I said to myself, ‘I can’t go on like this.'”
Northern Israel has been hit by rocket and drone attacks by the Lebanese Hezbollah militias during the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which began on October 7.
Iran fired a barrage of rockets in April – its first direct attack on Israel – and is threatening retaliation again after the Hamas leader was killed in Tehran last month.
– 15-second warning –
Given the activities of Iranian proxies in Iraq and Syria, as well as the Iran-backed Houthi rebels launching attacks from Yemen, Israelis feel threatened on many fronts.
“We are now even more worried because Hezbollah can reach us with its rockets,” says 79-year-old family doctor Lederer.
“We are also afraid that Iran will shoot at us.”
Due to the increasing range and technology of the weapons, the reaction time in the most dangerous areas near the border with Lebanon and the Gaza Strip is now only a few seconds.
In the 1950s, when the first public shelters were built, sirens sounded 30 minutes before impact – “enough time to even drink a cup of coffee,” says Lt. Col. Moshe Shlomo, technical director of the Israel Civil Defense Force, the Home Front Command.
Now, depending on where they live, Israelis have 15 to 90 seconds to get to safety once the siren sounds or a government-transmitted warning comes over their phone.
For this reason, authorities are asking residents to set up shelters in their homes, knowing that the journey to public or shared accommodation would simply take too long.
“The threat level in Israel is very high,” Shlomo told AFP at a military base near Tel Aviv, where an unexploded Iranian ballistic missile that fell into the Dead Sea in April is on display at a crossroads.
“There are other countries that threaten us with rockets and ballistic missiles.”
He added: “These (safe) spaces save lives. We saw it in this war.”
– “There is cause for concern” –
The shelters are designed to withstand a ton of explosives detonated from 15 meters away, and are airtight and have filtered ventilation in the event of a chemical or biological attack, Shlomo said.
The cost of building such a shelter varies between approximately $30,500 and $56,000.
Since the Hamas attack on October 7, which triggered the war and in which Israelis were attacked, kidnapped and killed in their homes, the heavy blast doors of the new shelters can be locked from the inside.
However, according to official estimates, about 55 percent of Israeli households do not have such shelters, either due to cost, lack of space, fatalism or stubbornness.
“There are many older people who say, ‘I don’t want anything, I’ve been here for 80, 90 years and I will survive no matter what happens,'” Shlomo said.
“We try to convince them. Some religious people don’t want to protect themselves because they trust in God.”
To persuade more people to set up shelters, the Home Front Command has reduced the processing time for building permits to 14 days and has processed around 4,500 applications in the last seven months.
For Pertzov and Lederer, it was their grandchildren who finally persuaded them to build accommodation.
“We have a lot of grandchildren and they come here to sleep because they don’t live nearby,” Pertzov said.
“So it’s something of a sense of duty and it causes great concern.”
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