‘The sky was filled with missiles:’ Attorney’s family in Israel during Hamas attacks, headed home now

By Janet Gramza

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    BUFFALO, New York (The Buffalo News) — A Buffalo attorney and his family were sightseeing in the ancient port of Jaffa, Israel, when Hamas-fired rockets started exploding nearby and air raid sirens went off just after dawn Saturday.

“Two bombs exploded in the water about 60 feet from us and shells were exploding overhead,” Steven Cohen said. “At the beginning, everyone just assumed this was part of typical terrorist attacks that are almost a daily event in Israel. But then, when the sky was filled with hundreds of missiles, and not just one or two stragglers, it became clear this was something else.”

It was an all-out surprise attack on Israel by the Palestinian Islamic militant group Hamas, which fired thousands of rockets on four cities, including Tel Aviv, killing hundreds of people and wounding thousands.

Cohen, an attorney with Tiveron Law in Amherst, was vacationing with his family in Tel Aviv since Wednesday, their first family trip in years. With him are his wife, Pam, sons Scott and Marc and Marc’s wife, Emily, who is six months pregnant.

After three days stuck in Tel Aviv, the family made it out on a flight Monday morning to Dubai and were hoping to head back to Buffalo, Cohen said.

When the bombing started, the Cohens quickly drove back to their hotel in nearby Tel Aviv, where they and dozens of other tourists were directed to take shelter in stairwells as mortars exploded in the distance.

They were staying on the 10th floor, but walked down the stairs as low as they could, “around the third floor until it was jammed with people,” Cohen said via text message because phone service was compromised.

“The first time we were in the stairwell bomb shelter, it was for the longest time,” he said. “The fact that I had my phone and had 80% power put me in a position to help. I had the ability to let people borrow my phone to notify loved ones that they were OK, and whoever had a lot of battery life left on their phones were letting other people use them to help our bunker mates contact family members.”

Israel has since declared war on Hamas and launched a counteroffensive that reportedly has killed hundreds inside Gaza.

Cohen said he and his family continued to hear mortars bursting, air raid sirens and the constant sound of helicopters transporting wounded civilians to the hospital in Tel Aviv since the Saturday attacks. Other choppers were patrolling the beaches in case the terrorists made an incursion by water, he said.

“Many of the people we’ve been interacting with are in tears, because their loved ones have been injured or killed, or are missing or have been conscripted back into the Israeli military,” he said.

After repeated trips to hunker down in the hotel’s lower stairwells, Cohen said the family would go back to their rooms to recharge, and finally stayed in the 10th floor stairwell until the sirens would stop. He called it “a bit unnerving.”

While texting with a Buffalo News reporter Sunday evening, Cohen was packing and trying to get a flight out of the country.

“Flights to the United States from Israel with American carriers have been canceled,” he said. “We are trying to get a flight elsewhere in the world because the situation is escalating.”

Hamas, the Islamist organization that rules Gaza, has called for the destruction of the State of Israel through jihad, or holy war. This is the deadliest attack by Hamas on Israel in its 36-year history.

The BBC reported that Hamas fighters invaded Israeli communities and went door to door executing people as well as taking hundreds of prisoners back to Gaza.

Cohen said his family’s initial reaction was not to leave Israel “because we didn’t want the terrorists to win,” he said.

“We wanted to continue to stay and spend money in this country, but we’ve been told that the State Department would just have to use its resources to look after Americans still in this country, and by getting out, we are freeing up resources to turn their attention to the diplomatic personnel who need to stay here as part of their work,” he said.

He said there was no place to spend money anyway because everything is closed and the streets are eerily quiet.

He said their plan was “to try to get out to a neighboring country, and then figure out the rest from there.”

At 7:18 a.m. Monday morning, Eastern Standard Time, Cohen texted, “Just landed safe and sound in Dubai. Figuring out the rest as we go along.”

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