‘Miracle of miracles’ – Kindergarten teacher saves 6 children by rushing to shelter despite alarm siren failure

Growing concerns over IDF's ability to track, shoot down Hezbollah drones

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Despite sirens not being activated, on Tuesday morning a kindergarten teacher rushed her six students to the local safety shelter when she noticed sirens in a nearby town. Minutes later, the drone directly hit the building they were in, causing material damage, but the children were left completely unharmed.

“A miracle of miracles happened to us,” said kindergarten teacher Sara Yassour, who garnered considerable media attention in Israel on Tuesday.

Yassour explained her actions in an interview with local media at the scene of the incident in the small northern town of Nesher, near Haifa.

מגיח לרגע מחופשת מחלה כי חייב לכתוב כמה דברים על אירוע הכטב״ם שהתפוצץ בגן ילדים בעיר נשר הבוקר:

1. נמנע כאן טבח המוני בילדי הגן, והכל בזכות גננת אחת חכמה, שהצילה חיים במעשה הרואי. מגיע לה אות הוקרה מיוחד. היינו יכולים להיות הבוקר באירוע מג׳דל שמס 2, או אפילו חמור וכבד דמים… pic.twitter.com/vY4noQvlqh
— דורון קדוש | Doron Kadosh (@Doron_Kadosh) November 12, 2024

“I’m a person of faith, so I want to first of all give thanks for God’s supervision, and our amazing team. We made an immediate decision only because we heard a very faint alarm, from the area of the Krayot, and we said, ‘Okay, fine, we'll go in [to the shelter]’,” she told Ynet News.

According to Doron Kadosh, Army Radio’s military correspondent, who himself hails from northern Israel, many northerners have started to mistrust the IDF’s drone alarm warnings after a series of failures and near-catastrophes in recent months.

Despite alarm sirens being activated in the nearby Krayot area, there were no warning sirens in Nesher when Yassour decided to bring the children into the kindergarten’s shelter.

The site of a Hezbollah drone impact at a kindergarten in the Haifa suburb of Nesher. The children were unharmed. pic.twitter.com/mYiPHmaOZH
— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) November 12, 2024

“We started a morning meeting with the children, they were all together and as soon as we heard the alarm and saw that it was a drone, I said, ‘we are not taking any risks’ – and in a few seconds we all entered the shelter. I think it was only after we got out of there that we realized the magnitude of the miracle because the place of impact was exactly where we were before entering the shelter,” Yassour said.

Footage from the impact site shows a blackened indentation on one of the outside walls of the building, close to the playground where Yassour said the children were playing just before. The inside of the building was covered in glass shards but suffered no major damage.

“When we were inside the shelter we heard a really crazy noise, and we realized that it was probably close - but we didn’t realize that it was in our garden. Only when we went outside with the children did we understand.”

The children were scared but were able to leave the shelter in an orderly fashion, before being quickly picked up by their parents shortly after.

The mayor of Nesher, Roy Levy, praised the kindergarten staff for their “huge initiative” and thinking ahead, while also criticizing the IDF for not activating alarm sirens.

“It may be that they also need to change a little and refresh their guidelines and activate alarms in more extensive areas, certainly when children are in educational institutions. But we are here together with the residents, practicing a lot, as the kindergarten teacher said, we are constantly on it, we train a lot to continue our routine,” Levy explained.

The near-catastrophe in Nesher once again underlined serious concerns over the IDF’s ability to track and intercept Hezbollah drones. “We could have been in a Majdal Shams 2 event this morning,” said Kadosh.

“⁠There is no nice way to say this – the residents of the north do not trust the warnings of the Home Front Command, and we can sadly say – they are right. The warnings often turned out to be unreliable,” he argued.

“I didn't realize it until I went to my parents’ house in the north, and one night they woke me up in a panic to enter the shelter. I didn't hear any alarms, and I didn't understand why, then they said there were alarms in a nearby settlement. ‘But we don't have alarms, why are you scared’, I tried to explain to them innocently."

"And they answered – ‘So what, who believes the alarms?’ Only then did I understand how a person who fears for his life, and has already lost faith in any military system, feels.”

The incident in Nesher also follows the catastrophic drone strike on the Golani Brigade’s training base that killed four IDF soldiers and wounded 58 others.

Following that incident, the IDF Home Front Command said that in cases where the IDF loses contact with a drone above Israeli territory, wide and ever-growing areas would be covered with alarm sirens until the threat was dealt with.

It remains unclear why this didn’t happen on Tuesday, and the IDF said it was continuing its investigations.

The IDF estimates that it has so far eliminated around 10% of the operatives of Hezbollah’s Drone Unit 127, which still has around 30% of its drone arsenal.