By GUY GALANSkiers ride a ski lift on Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights near the Israel-Syria border.(photo credit: NIR ELIAS / REUTERS)
It was near perfect weather for skiing – on Sunday, the Hermon in the Golan featured clear blue skies along with two meters of snow that had piled up over the previous week.Other people must have thought the same because the ski site was bustling.After skiing for several hours, at about 2 p.m., I had just skied down the main slope and was buying a hot drink near the ski lift at the base of the mountain. Suddenly, I heard an extremely loud noise unlike anything I had ever heard before. It sounded like two piercing whistles.“What is that?” I shouted.At first I guessed that the sound might have been created by two F16s flying really close to the ground. But after a few seconds I heard an explosion.Like everyone else, I looked up towards the sky and I saw two smoke trails and a rounded smoked shape at the end of these trails. It was probably only a couple hundred meters away. It was so surrealistic, and at first I couldn’t digest what I have just heard and seen.Someone who was next to me did it for me by saying, “wow, that was the Iron Dome and that’s the explosion cloud.”I sat down and drank my hot chocolate while I refreshed the news app on my phone to find out what happened.What kind of chaos and danger could have ensued at the ski site if the Syrian missile had evaded the Iron Dome and hit its target? I shuddered to think.I don’t know why, but I actually felt safe even after that experience. And since there was still a couple hours of daylight left, I headed back up the ski lift for another run.
