After hours of search and rescue, four bodies were recovered from beneath the rubble of a residential building in northern Israel's coastal city of Haifa hit by an Iranian missile attack the day before, Israeli authorities said Monday.
Eight others were injured in the missile attack which caused heavy damage to the multi-storey building, with one of its facades collapsing after being struck by a warhead that failed to explode.
This is the deadliest casualty inflicted by Iranian missiles on Haifa, since the outbreak of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran on Feb 28.
The warhead remains embedded in the rubble and therefore still poses a risk of explosion. Local police said that residents of the building and several nearby structures have been evacuated.
"Here at this site specifically, we're talking about part of the warhead that hadn't exploded yet, and so our bomb disposal experts have yet to conduct an additional secondary assessment. The first assessment was to assure that it was stable enough so that we can work here, and now the second assessment is going to be whether we're going to do a controlled detonation here," said Dean Elsdunne, an Israeli police spokesman.
The missile was part of several barrages fired toward northern and southern Israel on Sunday evening, which triggered air raid sirens across the regions as Iran expanded its main targets beyond Tel Aviv and several locations in central Israel.
Majid Mousavi, commander of the Aerospace Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said on Monday that in the past 24 hours, Iranian missiles bombed Haifa's refineries, power plants, ports, and rail lines with no sign of interception, and Israel's abandonment of the northern city effectively constitutes a defeat.
On Feb 28, Israel and the United States launched joint attacks on Tehran and several other Iranian cities, killing Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, along with senior military commanders and civilians. Iran responded by launching waves of missile and drone strikes targeting Israel and U.S. bases and assets in the Middle East.
4 killed, 8 injured in Iran's missile strike on residential building in Israel's Haifa
