The first sign that something was wrong, Dave Sarachan said, were the sirens.
“Incredible sirens that I had never heard before,” he said. “Then I heard a couple of things like thunder, but it wasn’t cloudy.”
It was just before sunrise on Oct. 7 and Israel was under attack. About 3,000 armed Hamas fighters poured into the country from the Gaza Strip while an equal number of rockets, fired from the Palestinian territories, rained down in the first 20 minutes of the surprise attack. Some sounded like thunder as they pierced the skies over Tel Aviv while Sarachan, a longtime assistant coach with the Galaxy and men’s national team, watched from the balcony of his high-rise apartment building.