Rocket attacks have followed Anat Dymshits for most of her life.

After immigrating to Israel from the former Soviet Union as a child, she grew up in the northern border town of Kiryat Shmona, which suffered Katyusha rocket attacks from Lebanon-based terrorists for years.

After completing her military service, Dymshits, 36, pivoted to the Negev in southern Israel to study, moving with her husband, Michael, 38, to Kibbutz Holit in 2014, just after Israel’s Operation Protective Edge against the Hamas terror group.

During the massacres on October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded Holit, a tiny, remote community close to the Gaza and Egyptian borders, and slaughtered 15 of its 150 members.

Gunmen entered the Dymshits home and, unable to open the handle of its protected space, shot at the door, seriously wounding her parents, Alla, then 57,  and Iosef Rojansky, then 67, who were visiting, and her daughter Ofek, then six.  Dymshits and another two of her children, Lavi, then four, and Gefen, then eight, were injured by shrapnel.

The Dymshits family is one of many that left the Gaza border for central Israel after October 7 and who now find themselves in the middle of the Iranian storm, as missile fire sends Israelis running to bomb shelters multiple times daily amid the ongoing US-Israeli aerial campaign against Iran’s clerical regime.

For the past two years, all nine family members — including her grandmother, Yulia Fainshtein, now 88 — have been living on Kibbutz Be’erot Yitzhak, near Yehud in central Israel. Initially, the move was made to be close to the hospitals where the three most severely hurt members of the family were being treated.

Doctors amputated Iosef Rojansky’s left leg from the knee down and performed multiple surgeries on Alla, who was only released 11 months later. Both still have mobility problems. Ofek also had surgery and came home after a fortnight. While physically recovered, she has post-traumatic stress disorder and is prone to sudden anger outbursts, according to her mother. She is receiving........

© The Times of Israel