When the Iranian missile struck the Weizmann Institute of Science at 2:45am, Professor Eldad Tzahor was just 400 metres away, sheltering with his family – including his grandchildren – in his campus home.
“We’re unfortunately used to rockets here,” he told Jewish News. “But this? This was nothing like anything we’ve ever heard before. The shockwaves were felt inside the shelter.”
Within hours, photos of the damage began to circulate. “You see one building on fire,” he said. “Then you realise – it’s your building. And then you look closer, and it’s your lab.”
Tzahor’s lab, a global leader in heart regeneration, was completely demolished. “We lost the entire lab. Equipment, tissues, samples, everything. There is nothing to save.” Among the most irreplaceable were frozen heart tissue samples from both animals and patients, built up over years of painstaking work.”
“You cannot redo an experiment that took six months of surgeries and longitudinal data collection. It’s gone.
The loss wasn’t only scientific. “It’s your second family,” he said of his team. “Weddings, babies, life – we share it all. One of my students said, ‘This was my second home.’ And now that home is gone.”
Prof. Eldad Tzahor, Department of Molecular Cell Biology at the Weizmann Institute. Photo: Monash University
More than 80 percent of the buildings on campus sustained damage. Tzahor’s was one of them struck directly. “We’re talking about thousands of tissue slides. Our own toolbox of custom-made antibodies, RNA, DNA, engineered viruses. You can’t just order that again. It’s not Amazon.”
Inside the gutted corridor of Prof. Eldad Tzahor’s lab, destroyed in the June missile strike on the Weizmann Institute.
Photo: Prof. Eldad Tzahor/X
What makes the destruction uniquely cruel is the nature of the work itself: regeneration. “That’s what we do. Cardiac regeneration. Now, I guess, lab regeneration. We’re treating it as a reset. What can we rebuild? What can we refocus? What can we do better?”
Some effort was made to salvage what was left. “My son-in-law climbed a smashed freezer and managed to retrieve some protein samples we’d been developing for over a decade. I don’t know if they’ll still work – they thawed to room temperature – but we tried.”
Since posting about the destruction on LinkedIn, Tzahor has received messages from around the world. “New Zealand. Singapore. Germany. The US. Muslim colleagues, Christian colleagues, secular colleagues, everyone. And they all said the same thing: Tell us how to help.”
Even so, he’s clear: “You can’t just move a lab like mine to Tel Aviv or Berlin overnight. First, the students need to be together. This is emotional – not just technical.”
Exterior view of the Weizmann Institute building housing Prof. Eldad Tzahor’s lab, showing missile damage and burned-out upper floors. Photo: Prof. Eldad Tzahor/X
The damage, he estimates, has set his team back at least a year. “That’s a huge amount of time for a PhD student with only four and a half years. And there are things we’ll simply never recover.”
Tzahor, who began his PhD at Weizmann in the 1990s and returned as a principal investigator in 2003, now faces the prospect of starting from scratch.”
“This isn’t just a lab for me. It’s my home. And they targeted it.
Still, he refuses to give in to despair. “We’ll rebuild and regrow. It’s what we do.”
Photo: Prof. Eldad Tzahor/X
He’s already begun thinking about the broader campaign ahead – not just to restore his own work but to make the case for science itself. “This missile wasn’t just aimed at concrete and machines. It was aimed at the future of medicine. What we do here, it’s for patients. It’s for humanity.”
That, he says, is what must endure. “Science connects people. It crosses borders. We collaborate. We share knowledge. This is the opposite of war. This is what brings us together.”
Asked for his message to the world, he doesn’t hesitate. “We will regenerate. That’s what the heart does – and it’s what we’ll do too.”
