Israeli rescue workers on Monday recovered the last of four bodies that were trapped overnight in the ruins of a residential building in the northern Israeli port city of Haifa, a full 18 hours after an Iranian missile crashed into it.
Israel’s air defense forces attempted to intercept the missile on Sunday evening, according to the Israeli military. At least part of the missile hit a terraced apartment building in the Vardiya neighborhood, on the upper slopes of Haifa’s iconic Mount Carmel, officials said.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps claimed in a statement carried by state media that Iranian forces had targeted an oil refinery in Haifa on Sunday, but it did not mention the residential building.
Erez Geller, the director for Magen David Adom, Israel’s ambulance service, for Haifa and its surrounding areas, was among the first to arrive on the scene.
“Part of the building remained intact, and part had collapsed into a hollow,” he said on Monday, speaking by phone from the site of the strike. “It looked like there had been an earthquake.”
The missile’s warhead did not explode, Mr. Geller said, preventing a much larger disaster.
Mr. Geller described how rescue workers removed stones and concrete blocks with their bare hands to rescue a man in his 80s who was conscious but severely wounded. He said a baby suffered a minor injury in the strike.
The four victims — an older couple, their son and his partner — were residents of the building that was struck, but unlike most of their neighbors they had not taken cover in the nearest bomb shelter.
The search for the victims’ bodies went on through the night. Two of them were found early Monday morning, then a third, then the fourth. They were not immediately identified.
The attack was the second deadliest in Israel so far since Israel and the United States attacked Iran more than five weeks ago. The deadliest was a missile strike that killed nine people in Beit Shemesh, a town near Jerusalem, early in the war.
At least 23 people have been killed in Israel since late February by missile and rocket fire from Iran and Lebanon, according to the Israeli authorities. All those killed so far by Iranian ballistic missiles, or debris from interceptions, have been civilians, according to the authorities.
Haifa has been a frequent target of missile and rocket fire from both Iran and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed force across Israel’s northern border in Lebanon. It is a strategic target because of its port and critical infrastructure, including Israel’s largest petrochemical and oil refineries.
At about 6.30 a.m., 12 hours after the attack in Vardiya, the ambulance service reported another missile strike in Haifa. Paramedics evacuated four lightly injured people to the hospital, including a man and a woman in their 40s, and two 5-year-old girls, the ambulance service said.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
Isabel Kershner, a senior correspondent for The Times in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.
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