“It was necessary to do it, but we did not expect it to affect us like that.”

“We were in shock,” he said, sitting in a camping chair next to a suitcase full of food and cleaning items.

The ballistic missiles that caused the damage to Bat Yam are much more powerful than the rockets launched by Hamas and Hezbollah during the last year and a half, which are mostly intercepted by the sophisticated Israel anti -air defense system.

The first people trapped under the rubble could be taken out of hours. At the last minute of Sunday, at least three people were still in an unknown whereabouts. “I saw fear in his eyes,” said the paramedic Ori Lazarovich. “People came out all gray, hollin covered, ash and debris.”

Avi, a 68 -year -old man who did not want to give his last name, was born and grew up in Bat Yam. “We have to keep attacking (Iran),” he says. “Of course we have to continue. If not, they will throw us an atomic bomb.”

“They are weak. We are much stronger,” he adds. “Israel is the number one in the world.”

Emil Mahmudov, 18, agrees: “We should have done it before. That is what most Israeli thinks.”

Israel's justification to attack Iran is to end its nuclear program. For more than a decade, successive governments have sounded the alarm on the possibility that the Iranian regime gets nuclear weapons, something that will be denied to search.

Even when Benjamin Netanyahu has been criticized within Israel for the development of the War in Gaza, its main political rivals -Beny Gantz, Avigdor Lieberman and Yair Lapid- have expressed their support for the attack against Iran.

Professor Yossi Mekelberg, of the Middle East Program of Chatham House, states that “there has always been support to prevent Iran to acquire nuclear military capacity.”

But, he says, “this is much larger than fighting Hamas in Gaza, even against Hezbollah in Lebanon, or that a very limited direct confrontation with Iran.”

“This is evolving towards a full -fledged war. And there is fatigue in Israel after 20 months of war.”

“If there are lower, if people spend a lot of time in shelters and if they become, again, another endless war,” then support, he says, could erode.

In the middle of Sunday, the Minister of National Security, the ultra -rightist Itamar Ben Gvir, recently sanctioned by the British government for “inciting violence against the Palestinians,” he arrived in Bat Yam to meet with those affected.

Flanked by a cohort of armed security personnel, he shook the hands of the owners of stores along a street where the expansive wave destroyed the windows of many of them.

One of them, who did not want to give his name, was sitting in a plastic chair in front of his bakery, which he had run for 29 years. He said he was there to avoid looting.

Is it in favor of opening a new front against Iran? “Of course,” he says stirring his hands. “What kind of question is that?”

Netanyahu also visited Bat Yam on Sunday, among songs of “Bibi, King of Israel”, a word game with a popular song about the biblical warrior king David that many Jewish children learn at school.

Hours later, in a speech at night, he lamented the deaths, affirming the nation: “This is a difficult day. I told you, there will be difficult days.”

Even with broad support to the conflict, if your escalation continues – and civilians' deaths continue to increase – you will have to ask how difficult Israeli public opinion will tolerate.

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