The front of the apartment was blown away, the walls pockmarked from shrapnel. A metal walker lay in the rubble.
This was the scene on Wednesday, hours after a missile from Iran killed an older couple near Tel Aviv, video footage from their apartment building showed.
A series of phone alerts and sirens blared across a broad swath of central Israel in the early hours of Wednesday morning to warn of incoming fire, followed by a quick succession of booms.
Millions of Israelis headed for bomb shelters or fortified safe rooms.
The couple, Yaron and Ilana Moshe, were found in their living room on the top floor of their apartment building in Ramat Gan, a suburb of Tel Aviv.
Neighbors told Israeli news media that the building was hit soon after a siren sounded. Mr. Moshe was disabled, they said. A local police chief said it seemed that the couple had not made it into the safe room in their apartment.
The explosion was caused by a cluster bomb, a small rocket or grenade-like munition from a missile warhead that breaks apart in the air, according to Israeli military officials and emergency workers at the scene.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said in a statement that it had launched a large ballistic missile attack on Wednesday on Tel Aviv in retaliation for the killing of Ali Larijani, the head of the country’s Supreme National Security Council.
Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, a spokesman for the Israeli military who visited the Ramat Gan site on Wednesday, said the circumstances of the couple’s deaths were still under investigation.
Israel’s air defenses have intercepted most of the hundreds of ballistic missiles fired at it from Iran since the United States and Israel began the war on Feb. 28.
But even after an interception, Colonel Shoshani said, a cluster warhead can disperse dozens of small rockets over an area of several miles. “It can cover a city with small bombs,” he said. Each one can carry up to 11 pounds of explosives.
“Iran’s use of cluster munitions against densely populated civilian areas in Israel constitutes a violation of international law and is being done in order to maximize harm to civilians,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
The video showed a hole in the ceiling, indicating that a rocket had penetrated the roof of the apartment block.
Ramat Gan wasn’t alone. Israel’s emergency rescue service, Magen David Adom, said that cluster bombs caused extensive damage in and around Tel Aviv, including at a train station in the center of the city and in the nearby city of Bnei Brak, where one man was hurt by shrapnel.
Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, whose role is largely ceremonial, visited the impact site in Ramat Gan later Wednesday. “Innocent people were murdered last night by a vicious ballistic missile from Iran — a cluster missile,” he said.
Soon after Mr. Herzog left, sirens wailed across central Israel again. The police said officers and bomb disposal units were working to isolate and secure impact sites where munition fragments had fallen in the Tel Aviv area. A man and two children were lightly injured, according to Israel’s ambulance service.
Isabel Kershner, a senior correspondent for The Times in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.
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