Harrowing video shows passengers onboard a British Airways flight narrowly avoid Iranian missiles as they rained upon Tel Aviv on Tuesday.
Footage believed to have been captured by a commercial pilot onboard a flight to Dubai shows missiles streaking across the night sky.
Alarming reports indicate that air traffic control (ATC) did not clear the skies before the missile launch began, putting nearby aircraft at serious risk.
Airlines scrambled to divert their flights as Iran launched a huge barrage of missiles over the Middle East without warning on Tuesday evening.
Flight trackers from the region showed a gaping hole in the airspace between Israel and Iran in the aftermath of the flight, with planes swerving to the north and south and even turning around mid-flight to avoid any potential missile fire.
One such flight was Air France AF218 from Paris to Mumbai, which turned around and headed back to the French capital after already spending four hours in the air (and battling a four-hour delay)
It should have take around nine hours to fly the more than 4,000-mile route, but eight hours in, passengers disembarked where they started.
The Airbus A350 had found its route blocked as it approached Turkey’s border with Iraq around 4.30pm UK time- just after Iran started firing a barrage of 180 missiles.
Air France said its flights to Beirut and Tel Aviv won’t resume until at least October 8 and has since diverted flights over Egypt and Saudi Arabi before continuing its usual Paris-Mumbai route over the Persian Gulf and United Arab Emirates.
A spokesperson for British Airways said: ‘Safety and security are always our highest priorities and we continuously assess and adjust our operations accordingly.’
The ballistic missiles’ orange tails could be seen from Egypt as they glowed through the night sky over Iraq and Jordan on their way to Israel.
Roughly 90% of them hit their intended targets, including Israeli airbases housing F-35 fighter jets, and the area near its Mossad intelligence service headquarters, according to Iran.
A nearby school was left with an impact crater on its grounds after taking a direct hit from at least one missile when no children were present.
More than 100 homes were also damaged, while dozens were injured, mostly from falling shrapnel after Israel’s air defence system intercepted missiles midair.
Israel had instructed its population of 10 million people to hunker down in bomb shelters when Iran’s missiles started their 15-minute journey.
The attack was ‘nearly twice the scope’ of the barrage of roughly 300 drones and missiles Iran fired in April after Israel assassinated some of its senior military commanders and a Hezbollah member at an embassy compound Syria.
Iran’s latest attack came after Israel’s military launched raids in southern Lebanon on Tuesday morning and killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an airstrike on Beirut last week.
Just a week prior, at least 37 people died and roughly 3,000 people were injured in the detonation of Hezbollah’s handheld communication devices, which Israel had booby-trapped with explosives.
Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 1,000 people in Lebanon in the last two weeks.
One of Israel’s missiles landed near the British embassy in Beirut last night, killing at least nine people, injuring 14 and engulfing homes in flames.
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