MIDDLE EAST: First came the whistling, whooshing noise, then two earth-shuddering bangs. The rockets had landed and people started running everywhere in panic. Naharia hospital was in emergency.
The loud-hailers around the hospital erupted. "Go to the bunkers, go to the bunkers," they barked in Hebrew. A handful of workers, taking a break after helping the wounded from an earlier Katyusha rocket barrage, rushed back inside. Dark smoke was swirling through the hospital grounds.
"Don't go out there," a man in white warned.
Hizbullah fighters in Lebanon fired at least 70 rockets into northern Israel yesterday, killing at least one woman in Naharia and injuring 42 people across the region. The woman was sitting on a fifth-floor balcony when a rocket hit her building and sliced through her ceiling.
Residents in towns near the Lebanese border were ordered to take cover in bomb shelters during what was the heaviest rocket barrage seen in northern Israel in a decade. Cars were seen driving south with suitcases tied to the roof, and rockets were reported to have landed up to 30 miles inside Israel.
Several buildings were damaged at the Meron Air Force base when rockets hit, the army said.
Inside Naharia hospital there was a mood of controlled panic but also one of defiance. Mano Cohen, a Holocaust survivor, was locking up the canteen much against his will. "The management told us to do it, but I think they're wrong," he said angrily. "I feel it's important to stay here and to serve the people."
His co-worker, an Argentinian Jew, had just come off the phone from her panicked son in Buenos Aires. She started to cry and he placed a comforting arm around her.
Mr Cohen admitted he had sent his children and grandchildren to Tel Aviv in the south, but he was going nowhere. As a child he had survived by hiding from the Nazis in underground basements in Poland and vowed never do so again.
"Look, when I opened my front door this morning I saw a Katyusha rocket fly by, literally. It was a bit strange but I've seen a lot of strange and frightening things in my life. In Naharia they've not seen so much, that's why some people are worried," he said.
Hospital workers agreed: the last time a rocket landed in the town was 10 years ago and the last barrage was at the height of the Lebanon war in the early 1980s.
As a precaution yesterday many of the patients, including women and children, were taken to the underground hospital - a reinforced basement which can hold 250 patients. It was completed in 2003 and was being used for the first time.
Walking through the corridors, hospital spokeswoman Judy Jochwitz showed where dozens of patients were lined up in underground wards. "It's a very dramatic development," she said.
One of the survivors of a rocket attack, Dr Pesach Gal ( 59), was nursing wounds from flying glass. "The missiles hit the wall 40 metres from me. The windows, doors, everything was shattered but I guess God helped me today," he said.
Propped up on a nearby bed, Ruth, a resident of Naharia with a broken arm and hip, said: "We're frustrated and angry. Now we have to change our whole life and go back 20 years. It's an unbearable situation living on the ground, but I think the real panic will only last for a few days. After all Jewish people are used to it - to fight, to suffer, to fight for our existence."
But no one in the hospital or Naharia city appeared to offer a clear idea of what they wanted the government or military to do - or how to do it, just so long as they made the rockets stop.