War Came to Our Tower at 2:11 a.m
When distance between life and death is 12 meters of concrete
By Habib Toumi
Bureau Chief
MANAMA: My brush with death on the seventh day of the war in the Middle East came at 2:11 a.m. on Friday. An Iranian Shahed kamikaze drone struck a flat about 12 meters from ours in our high-rise residential building in Manama, the capital of Bahrain.
I had been following the late-night news on television when the explosion tore through the silence of the night. The blast was brutal and ugly, a violent reminder of how suddenly destruction and death can intrude upon ordinary life. Within seconds, the smell of burning began to spread through the corridor, thick and suffocating.
My wife and I made our way to the stairwell, descending from the 13th floor. As we moved down the stairs, our thoughts were about our neighbors, what might have happened to them, who might be trapped, who might need help.
Outside the building, we found several distressed and dazed residents gathering in the open. Many were still trying to understand what had happened. Some stood in silence, others spoke anxiously on their phones, explaining the situation to worried friends and seeking reassurance from loved ones.
Above us, we could see the damaged flat burning in the darkness. It was a surreal sight in what had always been a perfectly quiet neighborhood where people from dozens of nationalities lived together in peace and mutual respect.
Emergency services arrived swiftly. Ambulances, fire trucks and police vehicles quickly filled the street, their flashing lights piercing the night. Firefighters and civil defence teams worked with remarkable efficiency to contain the blaze and secure the building. The fire was eventually extinguished.
Remarkably, the flat that was struck by the drone was empty at the time of the attack. Miraculously, no one was injured during the whole drama. Only one resident required light medical assistance.
Residents waited outside for nearly three hours before we were allowed back into the building’s lobby, a welcome return to relative comfort after a night of uncertainty.
After structural and lift safety checks were completed, residents were permitted to return to their apartments. Only one lift, out of the building’s usual six, was operational. We made our way back to the flat to assess the damage and try to restore some sense of normalcy. We had to do without the power that had been cut off from flats near where the drone struck.
The burned apartment in our building will remain a powerful, visceral reminder of the destruction of war. Just days earlier, another drone had struck a residential tower about 600 meters away from us, leaving a shattered apartment that still stands as a haunting testament to how quickly war can transform places of safety into symbols of vulnerability.
In a statement, the Interior Ministry said Iran had “targeted a hotel and two residential buildings in Manama. No loss of life was recorded. Civil defence extinguished a fire in a flat in one of the buildings.”
On Friday, the commander of the U.S. Central Command, General Brad Cooper, said that Iran had launched seven attack drones toward civilian residential neighborhoods in Bahrain that day alone.
According to the Bahrain Defence Force, Iran has launched 147 drones and 84 missiles against Bahrain over the course of the week.
Beyond the numbers and the military statements lies the quieter but deeper disruption of civilian life. Routine has been shattered. Ramadan, normally a time of spiritual reflection, family gatherings and vibrant evening life, now unfolds under the shadow of uncertainty.
Mosques have shortened prayer times to reduce the duration of large gatherings and ensure worshippers’ safety. Several churches have moved their services online or adopted hybrid formats. Prayer meetings remain suspended, while catechism classes continue virtually.
War, even when it does not kill, alters the rhythm of life. And in the quiet hours of the night, when sirens replace silence and drones replace stars, its ugliness and brutality, especially towards civilians, becomes impossible to ignore.
As I sat on the sofa, my thoughts drifted to books on war strategies, to articles of conflict management, to pictures I have seen about missiles and to videos I have watched about drones.
For those who design wars and discuss them in strategic terms, a missile or a drone is a tactical instrument.
For civilians, who never chose to be part of them, it is something entirely different: an object that suddenly tears open the fragile boundary between safety and death. A quiet building becomes, for a moment, a front line. A home became a target. And a peaceful Ramadan night turned into an evacuation in the dark.
The distance between war and ordinary life is far thinner than we imagine. At 2:11 a.m. on Friday, our building was struck. It was fortunate that no lives were lost. But across the Middle East, countless families have not been granted such luck. The apartment that burned 12 meters from ours is a reminder that in modern warfare the front line can be anywhere, even in the quiet residential towers where ordinary people thought they were far from the battlefield.
Long after the drone attack, the memory of that night will remain with those who stood outside our building beraving the cold in the darkness.
We will remember the confusion, the shock, and the relief when we learned that no one had died. But we will also remember that war, once unleashed, does not stay neatly confined to front lines and military bases. It travels until it reaches the homes of people who never imagined they were part of it, pulling them without warning, into the violence of distant decisions.
