In the early hours of Sunday, June 15, at around 2:45 a.m., the Weizmann Institute became the target of a ballistic missile strike launched by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Sirens sounded across the area, and many members of the Weizmann community were in their bomb shelters and safe rooms when the missiles hit—but nothing truly prepared them for what would follow. Within moments, flames engulfed laboratories and research spaces on campus, reducing decades of scientific work to rubble.
The Ullmann Building of Life Sciences had taken a direct hit, and the neighboring Wolfson Building for Biological Research was devasted from the shockwaves. Both buildings have been longstanding homes to pioneering cancer and immunology research, steeped in memory and meaning.
The Sussman Family Building for Environmental Sciences, one of the Weizmann Institute’s first “green” buildings, also suffered catastrophic damage. Nearby, a second missile hit the André Deloro Building for Advanced and Intelligent Materials, an ultramodern chemistry facility in its final phase of construction after years of development.
In all, some 60 buildings across the campus were damaged, from shattered windows to total ruin. The scale of destruction was unprecedented in the Weizmann Institute’s history.
Thankfully there were no casualties, but what became clear in the aftermath was not only the physical damage, but the human story—how scientists, students, and staff responded to an event that tested their resilience, as individuals and as a community, like never before.
The night science came under fire
Prof. Tamar (Tami) Geiger of the Department of Molecular Cell Biology, whose cancer proteomics lab was housed in the Ullmann Building, sheltered on campus with her young son in their apartment’s safe room when the missiles struck. Just two weeks earlier, they had moved from a different neighborhood on campus, one that ended up sustaining significant damage in the attack.
As messages and images circulated, she realized Ullmann was ablaze. Even more alarming, one of her students, a German doctoral candidate, had been working overnight inside. He was rescued within a few hours by the IDF’s Home Front Command from a safe room, suffering only mild smoke inhalation. Still, the thought of what might have happened weighed heavily.
When the fires were extinguished a day later, the devastation was clear: Prof. Geiger’s lab was destroyed. Machinery worth millions of dollars, including a mass spectrometer upgraded only weeks earlier, was lost, along with all her clinical samples.
While most samples can eventually be re-sent by clinicians, six were irreplaceable, among them one from a child with a rare brain tumor, which had been received just days before the attack.
Enter emergency mode
PhD student Ella Herzog from Dr. Rony Dahan’s group in the Department of Systems Immunology was at her home in Moshav Ganot, about 15 kilometers from Rehovot, when she awoke to explosions. She went back to bed, only to learn by WhatsApp later that morning that the Wolfson Building, where her lab was located, was in ruins.
At first, she thought the messages were a cruel joke, until she saw a video of the flames. At the time of the attack, she was midway through a pivotal pre-clinical trial, testing antibodies she had developed over five years.
Rushing to campus, Ella joined colleagues hauling freezer shelves up and down three flights of stairs, each load carried by hand. “My legs, which are not in the best condition on normal days, were screaming in pain, but I just couldn’t stop,” she recalls.
Dr. Yoseph (Sefi) Addadi, head of the de Picciotto Cancer Cell Observatory in Memory of Wolfgang and Ruth Lesser, a core facility of the Moross Integrated Cancer Center, arrived on campus at around seven in the morning after a sleepless night. He and many others worked to salvage what they could from the still-burning Ullmann Building, including samples, freezers, and personal mementos.
The de Picciotto Observatory, established a decade ago but housed in Ullmann for only the past five years, had just begun to hit its full stride. Its imaging suites, containing advanced analysis stations, microscopy systems, and a dedicated sample-prep lab, were decimated. From all that equipment, only a few computers survived—enough to help the image-analysis team resume work quickly, but still a stark reminder of how much was lost.
As scientists and students rushed into shattered buildings, the administration activated emergency protocols to keep people safe and ensure a coordinated campus-wide response. The first priorities were safety and stabilization: clearing hazards, securing sensitive materials, and assessing structural damage.
Engineers and project managers inspected each building while contractors cleared them for entry. Only after the campus was declared free of immediate dangers, nearly two weeks later, were researchers formally permitted to return. By then, some 52 labs—representing nearly one-fifth of all scientific operations—had been brought to a standstill. Some groups began relocating into temporary facilities on and off campus and tried to resume their work in whatever capacity was possible.
Science suspended
The attack shattered not only buildings and equipment but also years of work and the sense of continuity that defines a scientific life. Having spent more than three decades at Weizmann, Prof. Dan Yakir—2019 Israel Prize laureate and head of the Ecophysiology Group in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences—experienced the shock with deep perspective.
His Sussman lab was destroyed by the blast, and in the days that followed he wandered the ruins, retrieving old photographs, souvenirs he had brought back for students, and even the original hard-copy proposal for the research site he established in the Yatir Forest in 2000. These fragments may not have carried scientific value, but they embodied a lifetime of work. “It almost felt like a purification ritual,” he says.
While Prof. Yakir grieved for a lab built over decades, Prof. Geiger faced the loss of work that had recently reached critical momentum. Since joining Weizmann in 2021, her group had established advanced proteomic methods that were beginning to yield meaningful results—progress cut short when the attack struck. About a week later, one of their papers was published and another accepted, yet the protein analysis methods behind them relied on instruments that no longer existed.
“Just as we were about to harvest the fruits of four years of intense work, everything was wiped out overnight,” she reflects.
For Ella, the disruption came with the abrupt termination of her important trial. After years of effort, the experiment was forced to a halt, a devastating blow that left her reeling. “Someone asked me, is research really your life? And I said yes—because it is,” she recalls. Now working in a temporary lab in the Nella and Leon Benoziyo Building for Biological Sciences, she admits the new space “is not quite home yet, but hopefully will be soon.”
Dr. Daniela Novick, a senior research fellow who has spent 50 years at the Weizmann Institute, is widely respected for her contributions to immunology. Working closely with colleagues such as Profs. Michel Revel and Menachem Rubinstein, her research helped lay the foundation for drug therapies that today improve the lives of millions worldwide.
A daughter of Holocaust survivors, she began her doctorate in the Wolfson Building in the 1970s under Prof. Sara Fuchs, where she studied acetylcholine receptors, one of the nervous system’s main signal-receiving proteins and published her early work in Nature. Although much of Dr. Novick’s later career unfolded elsewhere on campus, the Wolfson Building remained a place of deep personal connection for her.
“Wolfson was home,” she says. “To see it in ruins was like losing a part of myself.” In those first days, the sight reopened a vulnerability she had not felt since the First Gulf War, when ballistic missiles fired by Iraq struck at the heart of civilian Israel.
Spirit of endurance
From the wreckage, the first shoots of recovery immediately began to push through. Within days, the de Picciotto Cancer Cell Observatory’s image-analysis operations were back online, thanks to the unit’s IT expert and infrastructure support from colleagues across campus.
The optical imaging arm is now being housed in a temporary space in the Dwek Campus Center, where new instruments are expected to be installed in the coming months. In the meantime, to provide continuity, the team has repurposed other devices on campus, refining their use and training researchers to take fuller advantage of them. “We lost our equipment, but not our knowledge or our people,” Dr. Addadi says.
That same spirit carried throughout campus. Thanks to her earlier efforts to rescue materials from the wreckage, and no small measure of luck, most of Ella’s antibodies were later confirmed intact. With the help of Danyel Biotech—a private company located adjacent to the Weizmann campus, which offered services and space free of charge to the Dahan lab—she was provided with a foundation to rebuild her research in immunotherapy and regain hope for the future.
In Prof. Yakir’s case, continuity was also made possible by a mix of effort and chance. His station in the Yatir Forest, on the edge of the Negev Desert, remained untouched, and his mobile lab, which happened to be parked elsewhere on campus rather than outside Sussman as it usually was, also survived. A laser spectrometer retrieved from the wreckage of Sussman was repaired and reinstalled in the Perlman Chemical Sciences Building, allowing one of Prof. Yakir’s PhD students to continue her long-standing project in ecophysiology, examining how living things adapt to their environment. The resumption of her research was a source of relief, which Prof. Yakir describes with quiet gratitude.
For Dr. Novick, who was born in Poland in the shadow of Auschwitz, continuity also carries a generational weight. To her, science has always been a way of building life out of loss, and the Weizmann Institute’s resilience in 2025 is not only about salvaged samples or restored lab spaces, but about the enduring spirit of inquiry that connects past, present, and future.
Resilience rooted in community
The strength of the Weizmann community stems from its longstanding culture of collaboration, reinforced after the attack by newfound depths of solidarity.
At the Ye’arim Hotel, located on the Ma’ale HaHamisha Kibbutz in the Jerusalem Hills, where hundreds of the Institute’s international students and families were evacuated, bonds were forged under extraordinary circumstances.
Felix Ribuot-Hirsch, a doctoral student from Paris under the supervision of Profs. Ofer Firstenberg and Nir Davidson in the Department of Physics of Complex Systems, recalls the atmosphere when he first arrived: “I was met with blank stares, people still in utter shock.”
Yet within days, a spirit of care and kinship steadily grew. Together, the Institute and the local kibbutz residents created a framework of support, from practical help such as laundry services to talks and activities that offered a sense of normalcy. The stay created unexpected connections, as students shared shelters during alarms, swam, hiked, organized impromptu seminars, and engaged in cross-faculty scientific discussions that likely would not have happened on campus. When one international student defended his thesis via Zoom, the newfound community marked the achievement with a celebration at the hotel. Felix even organized a movie club to lift peoples’ spirits, a gesture that helped replace displacement with togetherness.
“Normally, as foreigners in Israel, we are not the target,” he reflects. “But this time, the missiles were aimed at us, the scientists of Weizmann. For the first time, our very identity came under attack—and was hit. Still, being here, we are proud to continue our work.”
On campus, the same solidarity has defined the weeks and months that have followed. Dr. Novick describes mutual support as the Institute’s greatest strength: “That spirit is what will raise the Institute from the rubble.” Dr. Addadi speaks of colleagues across faculties who stepped in, sharing expertise, infrastructure, and time to get his unit operating again. Prof. Geiger emphasizes how her department head and peers ensured priorities were handled fairly, with no pettiness, only generosity.
From crisis to opportunity
Recovery will take years. The total cost of reconstruction is estimated at $500M, divided between rebuilding infrastructure and replacing destroyed equipment. The Israeli government has provided some initial funding, but much more will be needed to fully restore operations and ensure a strong future.
For scientists like Dr. Addadi, the crisis has become an opportunity: plans are underway to acquire next-generation imaging systems that will expand capabilities far beyond what was lost. For Prof. Yakir, the final years of his career will now be spent in a more modest lab in the Perlman Building. Yet he continues to look forward to the future—especially to the eventual inauguration of the André Deloro Building for Advanced and Intelligent Materials, whose scientific planning committee he has led for more than a decade.
Prof. Geiger is slowly rebuilding, convinced that renewal is possible even if the scars remain. Ella, though still distraught, is forging ahead with plans for new trials. And Dr. Novick holds steady in her belief that Weizmann’s true strength lies not in buildings but in its people and their pursuit of knowledge.
For Felix, who like other international students was offered a flight home (to France) at the Institute’s expense, the choice was to stay. Convinced that the worst was already behind them, he chose to focus on continuing his research—reflecting both his professional and personal commitment as a Weizmann student.
Now, he and his colleagues and friends are organizing a gathering to thank the Weizmann staff and administration for the extraordinary care extended to the international community during the war.
From individual acts of gratitude to collective resolve, the Weizmann Institute of Science showed that even profound loss and shocking violence could not deter its purpose. The brutal attack of June 15 was an attempt to extinguish light and enlightenment, to break the spirit of an institution built on discovery and the betterment of humanity. But, as this crisis has shown, that spirit cannot be broken. When science is attacked, Weizmann rebuilds—together.
An interview with Alon Weingarten, Vice President for Administration
You received word of the missile strike only moments before it happened. What was your first thought?
My first concern was the safety of our people. I was at home in Kfar Saba when I received a message that missiles were incoming. By the time I reached Weizmann, emergency services were already on site. From that moment, the administration’s role was clear: first safety, then continuity—evacuating hazards, stabilizing infrastructure, and only then bringing people back to work, even in provisional spaces.
How did you and your team manage such a complex response across the entire campus?
We divided the work systematically. Each project manager from the Institute’s Construction and Engineering Division was assigned a set of buildings to inspect and evaluate. Their findings were fed into a GIS (geographic information system)-based map with real-time updates, which became the basis for twice-daily status meetings with all the infrastructure heads. That system gave us a clear picture of the damage and allowed us to coordinate progress quickly and effectively.
What contingency plans were in place before June 15, and how effective were they?
We had spent years developing protocols and running drills for different scenarios. After October 2023, we expanded those exercises to include coordination with the IDF’s Home Front Command, even giving them a dedicated space on campus for safety procedures. On June 15 they were already in position, which proved crucial. Just two days earlier, as the escalation with Iran began, we had moved our 24/7 security operations room into a fortified site. That decision alone allowed us to coordinate the response effectively when the strike came.
What were some of the hardest decisions you had to make in those early days?
Knowing that 52 labs and nearly 700 people were suddenly without workspace was daunting. We had to balance urgency with safety, and resources were stretched thin. My approach was to project calm and control—people told me, “The way you’re handling this gives us confidence.” That meant a great deal to me.
How did the “broken windows” theory apply to your response approach?
Visible damage invites further disorder. So, we moved quickly to clean the campus—clearing glass from the roads, removing debris from the lawns, and fencing off the ruined buildings. Broken windows were boarded up, and we managed to source glass and aluminum despite extreme demand. Within a week, about 30 buildings were back in use, even if many repairs were temporary.
The financial toll is staggering. What is the estimated scope?
The damage is around $500M, roughly half in construction costs and half in equipment. The government has provided initial financial coverage, but it’s only a fraction of what is needed. We are working to have the Institute declared as a national strategic asset, which would ensure stronger long-term support [from the state].
Looking back, what stands out to you the most?
The resilience and cooperation of the community. Researchers, staff, and students all went above and beyond what was expected. I also want to commend individuals like Arik Shabat, who coordinated the evacuation of samples with the Home Front Command, and Hagai Friedman, who ensured the welfare of our veterinary facilities under very difficult conditions, both from the Construction and Engineering Division. Their dedication, and that of many others, continues to carry us through.
What is your outlook for the future of Weizmann?
I’m deeply optimistic. The resilience and dedication I’ve seen across campus remind me every day what makes this place unique. With that spirit, I’m certain the Institute will not only recover but continue to inspire and lead in science for years to come.
TAMI GEIGER IS SUPPORTED BY:
• The Applebaum Foundation
• The EKARD Institute for Cancer Diagnosis Research
• The Vera and John Schwartz Family Center for Metabolic Biology
RONY DAHAN IS SUPPORTED BY:
• The Dwek Institute for Cancer Therapy Research
• The Rina Gudinski Career Development Chair
DAN YAKIR IS SUPPORTED BY:
• The Hilda and Cecil Lewis Professorial Chair
THE WEIZMANN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES THE GENEROUS SUPPORTERS OF THE EMERGENCY AND RECOVERY FUND.