In the last five days since the Israel-Iran conflict began, hurrying into bomb shelters and hearing the sounds of alarms and explosions has become a way of life for Eli Birnbaum in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Birnbaum, born in the United States but moved to Israel with his family when he was 7, is the Israel director for Jews for Jesus — a California-based international Christian missionary organization affiliated with the Messianic Jewish religious movement.
“Everything has changed,” Birnbaum told The Christian Post in a telephone interview from Tel Aviv on Tuesday.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Subscribe to get daily/weekly email with the top stories (plus special offers!) from The Christian Post. Be the first to know.
“Every day since Friday, we’ve been announced that you have 10 minutes to be in your shelter, and so nobody is really willing to go 10 minutes from their house or from their shelter.”
He said stores have been closed, and “tension is high.”
“As you go to sleep and get these alarms, and if you are in the shelter, you just hear the explosions above you, and you really, really just hope that all you hear are two explosions and you don’t hear anything shaking because then you know it’s landed near you,” Birnbaum said.
“And that’s just the reality. Every single person now knows someone who’s probably been affected by it or who’s lost their home, and … you kind of go to bed trying not to think about the fact that you could get a direct hit and die, because there’s no discrimination, there’s no knowing where or when the missile will hit. So it’s been quite difficult.”
The Israel-Iran conflict erupted Friday after Israel launched an attack on Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure using warplanes and drones to kill top generals and scientists.
Since then, at least 24 people have been reported killed in Israel and hundreds wounded, while 224 people have been killed in Iran and many more injured, according to CNN.
And the violence has had an immediate impact on the work of Jews for Jesus in Israel.
“Half of our staff have to stay at home and be with with their families, as they are navigating this,” Birnbaum said. “And then the second half of our staff, we’ve been trying to understand how can we respond and help in whatever way — whether it’s those who are injured in the hospital, those who have lost their homes, and … any of the first responders and sites that are hit when they have lost everything and have to spend a few hours, trying to save people from the rubble.”
“We’ve been able to show up and provide water, drinks, cookies, and sandwiches, as that happens,” he continued.
As a global ministry whose work involves connecting with partners and groups from around the world, the isolation brought on by the conflict will make their work even more challenging.
“I was mentioning today when I was talking to our executive leadership team that I feel like I’m on an island. You know, we’re going to just be here by ourselves for a while. So it does feel very, very different,” he said.
“We have an outreach trip planned for September. We’re supposed to go to India and Peru. I don’t know if that will be possible. … All those things are all up in the air, so it’s a kind of a different world, taking us about 100 years back.”
The ministry is currently working on repatriating a group of 30 young adult American volunteers, which is also a challenge. With the shutdown of the Israeli airspace, Jews for Jesus is now “waiting and seeing what’s the safest thing” to do, Birnbaum said.
Israel’s Ministry of Tourism announced Tuesday they will help approximately 38,000 tourists in the country register for departure flights. In a statement to CP, the ministry said a digital registration form is being distributed through various digital platforms to the offices of incoming tourism organizers, hotels, tour guides, and other industry stakeholders. Tourists wishing to register are invited to fill out the form using this link.
“The Ministry of Tourism will consolidate the list in a digital vault and transfer it, only as needed, to the National Security Headquarters and the Ministry of Transportation, so that coordination with relevant airlines can be arranged to facilitate tourists’ departure from the country,” the statement said.
The Jews for Jesus director said that since the Hamas terror group’s surprise attack in southern Israel that killed over 1,200, mostly civilians, on Oct. 7, 2023, they expected something to happen. Israel launched retaliatory airstrikes and a ground offensive in hopes of eradicating Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since 2007, and securing the release of over 240 hostages.
“We’ve been preparing in a way for this for the last two years because we did expect at any point since Oct. 7 that there would be a greater missile attack, whether it was from Lebanon or from Iran. So we’ve been expecting it. We’ve been expecting that something would happen,” he said.
“We didn’t know that Israel would go on a preemptive strike, so that was something that really took us a little bit by surprise, though there were a few days before, there were indications that it would be happening. But in our minds, we’ve been prepping for it.”
Despite the challenges brought on by the war, Birnbaum said the volunteers and local Israelis accept that the preemptive strike on Iran was necessary.
“I think that the Israeli nation is calm, they’re resilient,” he said of his impression of the general mood in the country.
“They know that before the war started, our life was in more danger than it is today because now we know exactly that the regime that had a threat on our existence is being held accountable for its actions and for its plans,” he said.
“If Israel hadn’t attacked, there would have been a day that Iran would have done the first strike and then we would be in a very, very different world that we wouldn’t want to be in. So I think the Israeli public is … very, very willing to pay this price because they want to live in a safer, more peaceful world, and we would love to know the Iranian people and love to have peace in this area,” he said.
“Every single Israeli really grows up with a song that we sing that one day we won’t have to go to war. One day, we won’t have to be soldiers. Every child born since I’ve lived here, the parents would say to them, ‘You know, you may not have to go to war.’ And unfortunately, that’s not been the case, but I think that’s the hope, and I think there’s a lot of hope in Israel that this war would change this endless cycle of violence, and so people are hopeful and resilient in that case.”
Contact: leonardo.blair@christianpost.com Follow Leonardo Blair on Twitter: @leoblair Follow Leonardo Blair on Facebook: LeoBlairChristianPost
