I dodged death on historic day for Israel and Middle East

The Telegraph’s Paul Nuki set off for an IDF briefing, but faced an air strike, a shooting and Iranian retaliation

It was an extraordinary day, even by Israeli standards.
I woke to a call at 2.08am to say the Israel Defense Forces had launched a ground offensive in southern Lebanon.
Not since 2006 had the IDF officially set foot in its northern neighbour. Now tanks and troops were heading north to finish what Benjamin Nentanyhu started with his audacious pager attack two weeks ago: the annihilation of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
His strategy of aggressive escalation, embracing the exploding internet of things and much more, seemed to have been working.
The run of events had left Israeli Jews buoyant, with many thinking positively about their own and their country’s future for the first time since Oct 7.
Bibi was taking a “who-dares-wins approach” in the face of US and other liberal resistance, and he was carrying people with him, riding high again in the polls.
The ground invasion, it was assumed, would mark more of the same. Israel was on a roll and seemed unlikely to lose it.
The atmosphere was completely different from August, my last visit, when everyone was waiting for an Iranian missile strike that never arrived.
I headed northward with an Iranian-Jewish driver called Uri in his fast Mercedes.
The IDF was holding a briefing about previously secret operations it had been conducting in Lebanon and was promising to reveal “significant findings” at its Northern Headquarters in Kirat Sarah, just 10km from the border.
The conversation swayed from shawarma to Liverpool FC, of which Uri is a huge fan, when the Home Front Command app started flashing red on my phone.
There was an incoming missile headed our way from the north and there was about 90 seconds to impact.
The motorway was busy with cars and trucks, but we were moving fast. Pulling in on the hard shoulder and laying flat on the asphalt face down, as is advised, seemed risky in its own way. So we continued.
We were lucky, very lucky.
Three or four rockets had been fired by Hezbollah at central Israel from Lebanon, with one slamming into Route 6, which we were on.
It had passed over us hitting the highway near the town of Kafr Qassem and leaving a sizeable crater in the road
Shrapnel had ripped through a bus with 10 passengers onboard, wounding the 54-year-old driver in the head. He was hospitalised in what the Israelis describe as a “moderate condition”, which is seldom good.
Others on the bus were treated for acute stress. Another motorist, 31, was hospitalised with “light wounds”.
Hezbollah took credit for the strike, saying it had aimed its medium-range “Fadi 4” missiles at the Glilot military base near Herzliya, which houses the Mossad spy agency’s headquarters and the IDF’s signals intelligence unit 8200.
It was Mossad that everyone believes was responsible for killing and maiming more than 1,000 Hezbollah commanders with the exploding pagers and walkie talkies.
Uri’s dad called to check we were OK. More rocket alerts were flashing up across the north.
The briefing in Kirat Sarah was interesting and went smoothly enough but there was something a little off.
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Soldiers on the base had been ducking for the shelters over and over again at the weekend and large parts of the forest on the hills around the base was blackened and burnt.
Here they were telling us about an operation that had been running for the last 10 months, when just a few clicks away they were said to be fighting an active land war.
We set off back to Tel Aviv when at 5.30pm a call came through from Jerusalem.
“You need to get back to Tel Aviv – fast. The US says Iran is poised to fire ballistic missiles at Israel tonight. The good news is they will take an hour to get here once launched.
Uri’s view on the Iranian missiles was simple. “I hope one hits,” he said. “Then we can finish it. Finish it for good”.
We must have pulled in at the hotel entrance just five minutes before two Palestinian men from Hebron started shooting people at point blank range with an automatic rifle.
At the time of writing, at least six people were confirmed dead and nine wounded.
As I was flicking through messages on my phone showing bodies strewn on the street outside, the hotel manager called to say the hotel itself was locking down.
Were it not for Uri’s driving, and knowledge of the local roads, we would have been in the middle of it.
They say things come in three, so perhaps the ballistic missile barrage that was launched from Iran about an hour later should not have come as a shock – but somehow it did.
We were funnelled into the re-inforced basement kitchen of the hotel as showers of rockets bore down on Israeli cities.
The sky above lit up as large trails streaked across the black before coming to an abrupt end thanks to the Iron Dome interceptors.
Our own view was blocked but watching the missiles on a near-live feed arching over Jerusalem and heading our way a sadness set in.
Better perhaps than the real fear of an active shooter nearby, and a long way from infectious elation that briefly grabbed Israel after the killing of Nasrallah.
It’s a reminder that Israel’s enemies do not need to do much to cause enormous social, psychological, human and economic damage.
A rocket a month will keep those 63,000 citizens of the north away from their homes along the Lebanon border, for example.
It’s a reminder, too, that a strategy for military dominance is not the same as a strategy for peace – something that remains desperately needed.