From the Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Friday, June twenty, twenty twenty five. Federal police have written to more than a thousand parents and cares of kids who may have come into contact with a child sex offender who worked at after school care services. That story is live now at the Australian dot com dot au.
Sleepless Nights, ballistic missile attacks and babies born underground. Our reporters in the Middle East, Leah Mendes and Yonnibashan, join us between trips to the bomb shelter to reveal what it's like reporting the Iran Israel war. Jonni Vashan and Leam Mendez. A week ago, you were in our Sydney newsroom, rushing to finish your story before you jumped on a plane. When this war began, we had one reporter already in Israel, Page Taylor, who spent several nights taking shelter as the
missiles rained on Jerusalem. And then there was serious discussions between our editors about getting Paige out and whether it was right to send you guys in, especially as the airspace was closed and it seemed incredibly dangerous. Took me through the journey to where you are. Now, how did you get there? Starting from when you left Sydney, we were.
Getting these alerts coming through our phones about Israeli attacks on Iran, and at first we were just thinking, oh, it's probably just nothing, like do.
We even pay attention to this?
And then as the kind of hours wore on, both Liam and I immediately start talking to each other because whenever anything happens in Israel, Lamb and I start texting, you know, is this us going back to Israel? But once it became clear that this was serious and would have long term ramifications and potential tectonic shifts are growing in the Middle East, we were getting on a plane and we had a few hours to put everything together.
I started to write out of a column that we were putting out in the business section of the paper, which always fun. But then from Liam's perspective, you know, we're trying to figure out how long we're even going to be overseas for. We don't know how long this is going to tail out for. And so yeah, then we meet at the airport, right.
Yeah, Yeah, we met at the airport and we get to the counter, and the checking gentleman says to us, if you're traveling to you know, places like Iran, Iraq, you're not allowed to flight. Tel Aviv turned out was fine, but our flight had been canceled. But we could still get on this flight to Dubai. So we thought, okay, that's great, but how are we going to get into
Tel Aviv? So we spent about fourteen to sixteen hour flight I think it was figuring out how we were going to get from Dubai into Israel.
Love Bie, thank you very much.
Journey, But I just remember most of that flight sitting next to Liam, say, Justin's okay, what are the borders with Israel? We're thinking, okay, Jordanian airspace is closed. Do we wait to go to Jordan and then drive over the border into Israel.
It's not gonna work.
It's gonna take too long. We need to get there really fast. I mean, we sort of debated whether we'd fly to a place called Charmel Shake, which is in the Sinai in Egypt. The only problem is to get there from Dubai you have to go through neighboring Arab countries that aren't especially friendly to all passport holders, and it was going to be a little bit risky, so we thought, look a little bit high risk.
I'm not sure if we're going to do that one.
In the end, we decided to land in Cairo, which is an amazing place.
We didn't get see enough of it.
You could see the you can actually see the pyramids when you're coming into landing. Gorgeous if you on the rock side of the LEA was on the wrong side of the play.
I got to see the pyramids.
It's all happening here.
It's all happening.
If you.
Just started to hit us, I feel like you're gonna kill So I've been in Egypt and never see a single pyramid.
But yeah.
And then and then we organized a car. We got in the car and we just started driving. It was an eight hour drive through the Sinai and we started hitting checkpoints and we get held up. And at the first checkpoint that we hit and it's you know, it's all quite serious, but also in a weird way, like
very relaxed as well. And we get held up there for about an hour and a half and you know that they're standing there and like every guy comes around and that they're passing around our passports, and it was all it was incredibly entertaining sort of procedure to watch and a little bit, you know, a little bit anxious just to see what would happen.
We're in a checkpoint.
This is our first checkpoint, just before the sweers can out, before we go over it, and they've.
Taken our passports, and there's a bit of there's a bit of chatter. They all seem to be very amused that we can't speak.
Arabic, that's right, yeah, or any of the languages that are from our passports.
We keep presenting them.
Yeah, Yon's on a German passport. I'm on a Swiss passport.
I'm not sure how good that Germany is. All the Swiss, French, realmanch or German switch strata.
But they're just kind of standing there, just holding our passports now stilletting some other people through. I don't think they actually believed that we were journalists and that we were traveling to Israel. They sort of thought it was quite strange that you also had forgotten your your your press past, so you were trying to explain to them what margin call was.
That's the business column that y only writes in The Australian.
That's right.
So the thing is like they didn't understand what we were doing in Egypt.
We were like, we're trying.
To get to Israel and they're like, why do you want to go to Israel. It's like, because there's a war on we need to be there. And they're like, so why are you here. It's like because our ticket to Bengorion got canceled.
It's like, but why are you here.
It's like because we're driving from Karro.
Like no one does this, no one, No one gets into Israel this way. It's like very unusual. So they sort of sit.
Around with like you know, a fag hanging from their lips and flicking through our passports and just saying, so, who do you work for?
It's like the Australian. So they saw like my profile on the Australian's website.
But then Liam goes show them the video of us in Israel last year with the Iranian missiles and stuff like oh yeah, great idea. So Liam gets the video up and the guy and he fast forwards to the relevant bit of us with the helmets on and all that, and then the guy looks at it, and he's sort of really suspicious, and then he sort of starts enjoying himself, and then he rewinds the video to the start and watches the whole thing.
From start to finish.
It seemed like five or six minutes after that, he was like, all right, passport to go, go, go, get out of our sight.
Well, those those kind of checkpoints, you know, normally I think some people might might offer to pay a bribe to make things move a bit faster. But of course we've all done the News Corp, you know, anti corruption training, So you can't do that.
No, we can't be doing that.
The word backsheesh was constantly in my mind.
Acts we didn't do it.
So you crossed at a border crossing called a lad which is one of the few ways to get into Israel by land, and then you had to drive north. And of course all this time you're dealing with our editors anxieties, right, were you feeling nervous yourselves?
Honestly, the you know, I'd never been to Egypt, never been through the SINI. You read through the Smart Traveler website. It says like do not travel here. That was probably the uncertainty of you know, going through this very unknown area that you know that you know there's occasional kidnappings and and things like that going on there.
That was a little bit unnerving.
We did take the safest route through that part of the country, but in terms of like drones and missiles, the idea of sort of gives you enough notice when they see are coming through, and we're able to get a bit of an advanced notice if that was going to happen, And thankfully that didn't really happen. Whilst we were traveling from Elat to Tel Aviv.
It felt like for me anyway, the bigger risks were road accidents rather than getting hit by an errand drone. Driving at night in those locations is pretty hard. It's not very well. We were dog tired, I mean we'd left Sydney, we lost count of the hours. The whole thing's blur. We hadn't slept enough, we hadn't eaten enough. We were surviving and subsisting on like service station food, which if anyone who knows me, like that's just not enough. But that seemed to be the highest risk factor, not
necessarily drones or missiles. Besides, when you're in that kind of environment, you sort of block all that out and you're just thinking, I need to get to where I need to go, and how do I get there fastest.
We were running on adrenaline essentially.
So now you're in Tel Aviv, you're staying in a hotel, and one of the things you have to do during the day, of course, is go out and do reporting. But at night you try to it's in sleep. But I've said to Yanni, it's a bit like having a newborn. By the sounds of things, You're getting woken up every two hours to rush downstairs to a shelter.
Oh god, fuck, it's great.
So you can one in half an.
Half an Now that's great.
You must still be absolutely exhausted. Tell me what it's like to be woken up like that, this kind of broken sleep that you and the whole country are going through.
Look, I mean one thing, I have total empathy with expecting parents and parents of newborns now because I finally understand what it means to survive on one to two hours sleep a night, because that's basically what we're getting here. Like I think both Liam and I have learned that if you want to get enough sleep, first of all, you're never going to get it. You'll probably get maximum four hours sleep at night, so just get used to
that real fast. But if you want to get any sleep at all, go to sleep at about eight thirty at nine o'clock in the evening. If you can sleep until the first alarm, which tends to be around midnight, and then very rudely sometimes like it'll come half an hour later, maybe an hour later, sometimes at four am. I think the most alarms we've had in one night
is three. And that makes for a really crappy day the following day, especially when you know you're facing the usual pressures that any correspondents face, like you're trying to find stories, you're trying to write stories. I tend to find I'm at my most crankiest when I'm out of sleep and I'm trying to write something, and sentences, as you'll know clear because I often call you in a panic, going what do I do? But sentences that I know
how to formulate. My brain just physically won't leave my fingertips and get onto the screen in front of me, or if they do, there are garbles, I need to rub them out and do them all again, and in doing so in rubbing out what you've done and then trying to do it again, you work yourself even harder, and then you make yourself more tired. And so what I've learned is just just stop doing everything and go to sleep.
So Liam, we've got some amazing vision of you and Yonni Ami.
You wake up and.
Then what happens.
Essentially the sky is just lighting up and there there's the Iron Dome and other interception missiles are coming up and essentially trying to track down these ballistic missiles that have come over from Iran, and you hear these explosions going off.
You've got we've got a second wave missiles and the way.
Last hour and.
Then suddenly it gets through and it lands about two kilometers south of where we're staying, and you hear this huge eruption. Then there's a follow up all of eruption, and before that, you know, you see the flames because it takes a couple of seconds for the sound to come through, and you've sort of and then there's this huge, you know, waft of it smells like gunpowder and there's
car alarms going off. And we actually went and visited that impact site yesterday, so I think one of the craziest things is, like we will set up our cameras on the belt.
We've become very match fit at dealing with the sirens. We know exactly what to do now. But the first night we did it, we heard the sirens kind of got up and I very amateurly said to Lam, yeah, yah, we've got like twenty minutes. Don'torry about it, like, you know, we can set up a cameras.
I'll make a coffee whatever.
So Liam goes outside, sets up a camera and suddenly the iron doome swings into action and up go these brilliant flares from the rockets, and there we hear the incoming wosh of the ballistic missiles from Iran, and we're recording and we don't know whether to run or whether they say and there's a lot of kind of situational panic going on. In the end, we just keep watching, and then a missile lands and it looks like it's
about a couple of kilometers away. We hear the sound and the blast wave of it a few seconds afterwards, because there's always a delay. But when Liam and I went back there yesterday just to take a look at what was going on, I mean, the place was decimated.
You could tell exactly where that ballistic missile had landed, and then every single building surrounding it had sort of the front of.
It, had been blown out.
It was remarkable to see that the damage that had happened there.
I think what I wasn't expecting was just how much damage is caused by either the missile itself or just a very large fragment of it that lands at velocity. It doesn't just hit the building, it'll completely wipe out
the buildings around it. But then the blast wave will just shatter all timber, all glass, It will break non reinforced concrete off every building in two hundred meter radius, and that causes the shutdown of a particular part of the city, economically damaging, notwithstanding everything else that's causing economic damage around here, like all the shops are closed, there's no one around, you can't gather in places with more than thirty people, et cetera.
Before this war started, you know, it was unheard of these ballistic missiles getting into Tel Aviv. But now it's happened, and it's happened on repeated occasions. You know, this war's been going for seven days now and there's been multiple impacts, and I think that is what people here are finding so unreal.
Coming up Israeli's adapt to a new kind of war. When it's daylight, you're out in about reporting, but still some miss the tacks are occurring, and so you've got to kind of take shelter wherever you are, whether that's under an overpass or if there's nothing like that nearby, presumably you just got to lie down on the side of the road.
So we've had an alert telling us that we need to find a protect the space and take some cover up because the missileparage is coming in.
From you are.
People just have to walk that's right, pull over to the side of the road to get out of the car and find a ditch and get away from the cars because they can turn it to shrapnel.
And here we are, they're in the air and you can hear them exploding.
Do you have a preference.
Would you rather be in the hotel bomb shelter or under an overpass on a freeway in broad daylight?
Personally, I'd rather be under the underpass in broad daylight with a large field around me, because you can just see the scale of what's available for where the missile can land, Whereas, for some reason, you feel very contained and sheltered in a good way when you're in the basement of a hotel or elsewhere, but you also feel like there's something kind of solipsistic happening in that moment, whereas when you're in a field, you're like, there's no way it's going to hit me. It's going to hit
that tree, it's going to hit that thing over there. Also, when you're cramped in a shelter what they call here in the cloth, when you're cramped here in one of these things, you're surrounded by other people and you kind of absorb their panic and their anxiety, Whereas when you're in a field, there's a bit more space, you can breathe, there's something slightly more relaxing about it, and you can see.
When you're in the field, you know some of these missiles come through. When you're in a shelter, you don't know what's happening outside. There's like hardly any phone reception. Sometimes an alert will come through and a little bit of information will come through, or like half a video will load of an impact, But at the end of the day, you don't really know what's going on until you've left and you've gotten a bit of Wi Fi reception.
But when you're in there, you essentially don't know what's happening unless you hear an explosion or a thud or and even then you don't know what that is, hit, where that's hit. Whereas when you're out in the field, you can see everything around you. You can see the missiles being intercepted as we saw two days ago.
You also, if I can just quickly add, there's like different characters to the shelters. So for example, when you whenever there's a siren in this particular hotel, we go to the shelter, but we get everyone who's been hanging out on the beach. So all these surfers will come in dripping wet and their bodies and like there'll be dog walkers coming in. We went into the shelter last night and like this beautiful husky turned up, so that
like kind of lifted everyone's spirits for a minute. That was nice, and then other dogs got to come in. They all have to play nice, and you don't really feel like you're in a shelter, whereas at night everyone kind of like you know, Treasures of the Elevator, bleary eyed in their nineties, and you know, we go down to the shelter and look at each other like not this again, and.
People are arguing with their families and things like that.
It's like, you know, you kind of get to know these people and you're like, oh, hey, it's you again. Hey here you go, oh because you And then you know, we were laughing at this one guy who'd sort of had an argument with his wife and daughter, and you know, they were trying to figure out how they were going to get down, and then one person didn't want to get in the lift, and then we just you know, you just kind of look at each other and have a bit of a laugh.
It's a level of intimacy no one wants.
Basically, well, we're thinking about you all the time. Take care, guys. Where Mendez and Yonni Bishan are our correspondents in the Middle East. You can read their reporting anytime at the Australian dot com dot au