On a recent morning at the Shulich Faculty of Chemistry at Haifa’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, three post-doctoral students from India were immersed in their research experiments. The lab was crowded with glass beakers, bottles, test tubes, and syringes.

Suddenly, a siren blared, indicating a possible incoming Iranian ballistic missile.

The students calmly filed out of the Ashraf Brik lab, as though this drill were part of normal procedure, and headed for the protected room down the hall. One didn’t bother to take off his white lab coat and gloves.

After about 10 minutes, the students returned to the lab and resumed their work. This time, there was no damage.

However, two days later, on March 26, another Iranian missile barrage struck the campus. Nobody was hurt, but the campus sustained damage to one of its libraries, several other buildings, infrastructure, and equipment.

“I heard the impact and felt the vibrations, which were very frightening and left me feeling shocked,” Ashok Donthoju, 37, one of the Indian students, told The Times of Israel after the attack. “But we’ve been trained to protect ourselves.”

That strike was followed by another Iranian ballistic missile attack on Haifa this Sunday that killed four people who were buried under the rubble at the site, rescue services said Monday. A fresh barrage targeting the same area lightly wounded four people and caused additional damage.

US President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that Washington had agreed to a two-week ceasefire, potentially ending the war against Iran launched by the US and Israel on February 28.

The students’ ability to move seamlessly from the lab to the nearest protected room and back again is characteristic of many foreign students at the Technion and other Israeli universities who have stayed put since the ongoing war with Iran and Hezbollah began on February 28. Before that, even after the bloody Hamas invasion of October 7, 2023, many foreign students remained in universities around the country, despite the........

© The Times of Israel