Mom snatches children seconds before death
Miri Tamano woke up her three children and pulled them into a safe room just seconds before a Grad rocket smashed through the roof of her Beersheba home and landed in one of the second floor bedrooms.
The story, which astounded her neighborhood, was made more remarkable by the fact that she was sound asleep when the warning sirens rang out at 3:43 a.m. to alert residents of an incoming Gazalaunched rocket.
“I heard the alarm,” the single mother told the media. “I thought it was a dream. When I came to my senses, I hurried to take the children to the security room. I was trembling and I was afraid.”
Her sister Ora said that Tamano was sleeping on the first floor, ran up the stairs, and woke her three sons, ages eight, 10 and 12, who all slept in different rooms.
“Two of them didn’t want to wake up and she had to drag them out of bed,” Ora said.
The two-story home, located on a culde-sac off a main road, was completely destroyed.
“I no longer have a home,” she said. “The memories are gone. Inside the house, the closets were stuffed with all kinds of things – and now there’s nothing left.”
Throughout the day, reporters, cameramen and neighbors gathered outside her home, long after she had relocated to a nearby hotel.
Little was left of the red tile roof or some of the walls. A blue bed could be seen above the rubble on the second floor, under the hole the rocket made when it struck the structure. At times the wind blew sand into the eyes and mouths of the bystanders.
A mother of five who lives nearby, Nurit Bar-Khanin, almost burst into
tears as she surveyed the destruction, which easily could have befallen her home.
“This was luck,” she said. “An alert mother did what she needed to do and saved her family.” Bringing her family to safety was particularly difficult, Bar-Khanin said, because her oldest son, age 29, is physically disabled and cannot walk. Her husband had to lift him out of bed and carry him to the safe room.
“Just after 3:30 we heard the alarm,” she said. “We got all the children into the safe room and then we heard a serious ‘boom.’ The whole house shook.”
Each time there is an alarm in the city, her family runs to the safe room, Bar-Khanin said.
“We live with fear all the time,” she said. “But at the same time, we cannot stop our lives.” •