Tel Aviv has been gripped by chaos after a powerful IRGC missile barrage sent residents racing for shelters, turning Israel’s commercial capital into a city of sirens, fireballs and gridlocked streets, defence officials and witnesses say.

The attack began just after 11:30 p.m., when air‑raid sirens howled across the Gush Dan metropolitan area. Within seconds, Iron Dome and David’s Sling batteries were firing in rapid succession, streaks of white exhaust tearing into the night as interceptors rose to meet incoming ballistic and cruise missiles launched from western Iran.

From high‑rise stairwells and underground car parks, residents filmed mid‑air detonations lighting up the clouds, followed by bone‑shaking booms and showers of burning debris. In several neighbourhoods, fragments punched through roofs and set cars and balconies ablaze; an industrial strip south of the city suffered a direct or near‑direct hit, igniting warehouses and sending a thick plume of smoke over the Ayalon highway.

Emergency services report multiple blast sites and dozens of casualties, mostly from shrapnel and flying glᴀss as people scrambled toward public shelters and reinforced safe rooms. Panicked motorists abandoned vehicles in intersections to sprint for building entrances, leaving major junctions frozen in place as fresh sirens echoed overhead.

The IRGC is hailing the strike as “a calibrated blow to the Zionist heart,” vowing more salvos if US‑Israeli attacks on Iran continue. Israeli officials insist the “vast majority” of missiles were intercepted, but concede the psychological impact has been severe.

For Tel Aviv’s residents, the message of this night is brutally simple: the war with Iran is no longer a distant exchange of headlines and maps — it is a drumbeat of sirens, concrete stairwells, and the constant fear of the next barrage.