Sioux Falls travelers forced to leave Israel as violence erupts

The sirens went off just as their first full day in Israel began.

Longtime Sioux Falls attorneys and friends Jim McMahon and Tom Welk had tried twice already to travel to Israel along with their wives and been derailed by the pandemic.

It became clear hours after arriving in Tel Aviv that this trip was about to unfold counter to their plans too.

“Kathy my wife and I were at breakfast, and the sirens went off,” McMahon said. “I said, ‘That sounds a lot like air raid sirens.’ About 10 seconds later, the staff said, ‘You have to follow us please,’ and they took us to a reinforced area, and that was over very quickly.”

Upstairs, Welk and his wife, Terry, hadn’t yet left their hotel room.

“I said, ‘Nope, that’s not a fire alarm,'” Welk said. “You get about 30 seconds after the siren goes off to hit the ground.”

Their tour provider, Odysseys Unlimited, took it from there.

“They just did a magnificent job,” Welk said. “Why I wasn’t concerned was because of the control of the company.”

The company told them there would be an update later in the day. While they stuck close to the hotel that day, the couples at one point decided to walk outside for some air and to take in the views along the Mediterranean coast.

“There were people milling around outside. I think the Israelis are used to this kind of thing,” McMahon said. “We said we’re going to walk down the sidewalk, and we won’t go too far. There wasn’t much open because it was the Sabbath.”

Then, the air raid sirens went off again. The locals fled into buildings.

“We’re not very well trained in the U.S. for sirens,” Welk said. “A young girl and her boyfriend were laying by a pillar and said, ‘Get down.’ They said every building has a door open, and you can go in a bomb shelter.”

They were told to lay with their hands around their heads “to prevent the shrapnel from getting in your head,” Welk said.

Gaza was 44 miles away.

McMahon stepped out from behind the pillar.

“Being ever curious, I step out to look out and see what’s going on, and I see missiles coming right toward Tel Aviv from Gaza and just four clouds of smoke. Just ‘poof!’ and that Iron Dome just knocked them out of the air, so that’s all there was to that.”

The density of the area is striking, he said. It explains the near certain human cost that a war in this part of the world will bring.

“It’s hard for us to comprehend, at least it was for me, how close everything is,” he said. “It’s just all buildings. It’s like one big city.”

That evening, they were preparing for a welcome dinner that turned into a farewell diner when the sirens went off a third time.

This time, the Welks were already downstairs.

“They took us down to the kitchen and … then we went down two or three levels into the basement into what looked like an employee room … and we were down there 20 minutes or half an hour,” Welk said.

In the meantime, the McMahons, whose room was far from the shelter, had been told to go into the stairwells, which were reinforced.

“So we were in there with a couple families, and there was at least one, maybe two missiles that got through,” McMahon said. “And one hit close. It was a loud explosion and actually shook the hotel. It was kind of like, OK, I guess Tel Aviv is not safe.”

Early the next morning, the group was bused to the border with Jordan, which had remained open at that point.

From Jordan, the couples flew to Turkey and proceeded to navigate a complex trip home filled with delays, including some because it wasn’t possible to fly over Israel as they attempted to leave the Middle East.

“It took us three hours at the border crossing, but that was all tourists,” McMahon said. “There weren’t any Israeli citizens we saw trying to flee from Israel.”

Before they left, the touring company had briefed the group multiple times, allowing them to hear from a former Israeli paratrooper and a professor and military adviser who had lost two of his students in the attacks.

“Everything he told us that night is happening,” Welk said. “He said there’s going to be a ground offensive, and this is going to get a hell of a lot worse.”

The Israelis seemed entirely caught by surprise, McMahon added.

“The atrocities that were committed caught everybody off guard, and once word of what happened got out, they said: ‘This is a whole different ballgame. And this has a potential of getting out of control,'” he said.

“It’s horrific. People say maybe Israel is overreacting. Well, I would be overreacting too.”