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At least nine people were killed and 11 remain missing after an Iranian missile struck the central Israeli city of Beit Shemesh on Sunday, making it the deadliest single attack on Israeli soil since the war began.
Police said more than 45 people were evacuated with injuries of varying severity, while search and rescue operations continued into the evening as teams worked to locate those still unaccounted for beneath the rubble.
The missile impact devastated a residential area in Beit Shemesh, a city of roughly 150,000 located about 30 kilometers west of Jerusalem. Photographs from the scene showed at least one house reduced to mangled concrete and twisted iron bars, with rescue personnel sifting through the debris.
Israel's Magen David Adom emergency services confirmed the death toll, saying EMTs and paramedics had pronounced nine people dead at the site. Police said contact had not yet been established with 11 additional people believed to have been in the area at the time of the strike.
Dozens of rescue workers were deployed to the impact zone, with heavy equipment brought in to assist the search for survivors. "Apparently, there are still people underneath," an AFP photographer at the scene reported, as teams continued to dig through the wreckage.
Yehuda Shlomo, an MDA paramedic, described arriving to find "heavy structural damage, smoke in the air, and a great deal of chaos, with dozens of frightened casualties emerging from damaged buildings."
The strike came as part of a rapid Iranian retaliation after the United States and Israel launched a wave of joint strikes against Iran on Saturday that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Tehran's response continued into Sunday, with the Beit Shemesh attack representing the most lethal single strike of the escalating exchange.
The killing of Khamenei, who had served as Iran's supreme leader since 1989, marked a dramatic escalation in the broader conflict and appears to have triggered an immediate military response from Tehran.
Sunday's attack carries echoes of the 12-day war between Israel and Iran last June, during which nine people were killed in an Iranian missile strike on Bat Yam, a city near Tel Aviv. The Beit Shemesh toll has already matched that figure, with the number expected to rise as rescue crews continue to search for the missing.
Police said search operations remained ongoing and urged residents to follow civil defense instructions as the security situation continued to develop.
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