By Alexander Cornwell and Dedi Hayun
TEL AVIV/ARAD March 22 (Reuters) – Southern Israeli towns woke to widespread damage on Sunday after air defences failed to intercept two Iranian missiles overnight that injured scores of civilians in one of the worst attacks of the war so far on Israeli soil.
As daylight broke, the scale of the damage in the desert town of Arad, where one of the strikes hit a multi-story apartment bloc, came into clearer view, with entire floors blown open by the blast.
Southern Israel’s Soroka hospital described the attacks as a mass-casualty event. In Arad, 31 people, including 18 children, required hospitalization, at least nine of them in serious condition, the hospital said. Dozens more were lightly injured.
Footage verified by Reuters showed flames engulfing the top floor of an apartment building shortly after the strike. Search and rescue teams moved from floor to floor inside the damaged buildings.
Israeli military spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani said both strikes had been carried out with conventional ballistic missiles. He declined to comment when asked about the initial findings of a military investigation into the failure to intercept the missiles.
NETANYAHU SAYS MIRACLE NO-ONE KILLED
Most Israelis receive alerts on their mobile phone when launches from Iran are identified. An air raid siren sounds and they then have a few minutes to go to safe rooms or public bomb shelters.
“It is a miracle that no-one was killed,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday, standing in the crater at the impact site in Arad.
Pointing at the blown-out walls of the apartment bloc and then at the reinforced undamaged wall leading to a shelter below ground, Netanyahu urged Israelis not to be complacent. No-one would have been hurt, he said, had all sought shelter in time.
Uri Shacham, the chief of staff of Israel’s ambulance service, said at least eight buildings were damaged in the strike on Arad.
Israel said Iran was targeting civilian population areas. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they targeted military and security-related sites in retaliation for Israeli strikes.
Arad and Dimona, the other city that was hit, are located close to Israel’s secretive nuclear reactor and several military bases, including Nevatim Air Base, one of the country’s largest.
In Dimona, five people were hospitalized, including a 12-year-old boy who was in a serious condition, the hospital said.
Since joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, Israel has come under daily missile fire from Iran.
AT LEAST 15 HOSPITALIZED
At least 19 civilians have been killed in Israel and the occupied West Bank in Iranian attacks since the war started.
The Israeli military said Sunday evening it was investigating whether a man killed near the Lebanon border earlier that day, following a launch from Lebanese territory, had been struck by Israeli fire.
At least 15 people were hospitalized on Sunday in fresh Iranian attacks, according to emergency services, including a cluster munition that struck in Tel Aviv.
Israeli and U.S. strikes have killed at least 1,300 people in Iran so far, according to the Iranian government. The U.S.-based rights group HRANA, which tracks human rights violations in Iran, has recorded 3,320 people killed, including 1,406 civilians and 1,167 military personnel, with the remainder not yet determined. Reuters could not independently verify the data.
(Reporting by Alexander Cornwell; Editing by David Holmes and Christina Fincher)
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