Israeli Father Shares Ordeal from Inside Bomb Shelter with Son, 12, Who Has Serious Heart Condition (Exclusive)

"Every time a bomb or rocket goes off, our building shakes," says Oren Yaakovian, who has stayed in hiding with his sons while his wife treats soldiers at a hospital. "The kids are crying, the kids are hysterical"

Every Saturday on Shabbat, Oren Yaakovian dials his Israeli friend in the United States and gives her updates on his family, including his 12-year-old son, Yehonathan, who's living with a serious heart condition.

On Saturday morning, while he was on their weekly phone call, Yaakovian — who lives in the Israeli city of Ashdod about 30 minutes from the Gaza border — heard sirens, a normal occurrence for those living in southern Israel, he explains.

But what happened next, he says, was unlike anything he's seen before. In his own words below, Yaakovian shares more with PEOPLE about that moment, and the tumultuous few days that have followed for his family as violence continues in Israel and Gaza.

Saturday morning around 6 a.m. Israel time, the sirens went off. I was on the phone with my friend at the time and told her I needed to run to the bomb shelter. Within seconds I heard people walking in the streets, then guns.

Pictures I took captured people lying dead in the street, covered in blood. Another photo I took shows the street outside on fire with debris of cars scattered all over. I also saw terrorists riding through the streets in cars, their hands loaded with guns.

I know people that died. A woman who's my neighbor got hurt from a rocket on Monday. She got hurt all over her body and is in a threatening situation. For her, it's life and death. My heart hurts for what's happening here. The number of people murdered keeps growing.

Related: Israeli Father Recalls Panicked Phone Call Before His Wife and 2 Young Girls Were Kidnapped and Taken to Gaza

Before today (Wednesday) I had been in the bomb shelter — a really small room in my house — with my family since that moment I hung up the phone with my friend on Saturday. Among those in the shelter are my sons: Liam, who's 4 years old; Yehonathan; and Dor, who's 18.

Every time a bomb or rocket goes off, our building shakes. The kids are crying, the kids are hysterical.

My sons don't want to leave the room because we think there are still people outside in between the buildings. They also haven't cleared the streets. We don't want our kids seeing what's going on. There are people who've been set on fire lying there.

Related: President Biden Condemns Hamas Attacks on Israel as 'Pure, Unadulterated Evil'

Today I left for the first time since Saturday to go to the grocery store. I knew I eventually would need to leave to buy food and water. There's no choice. It's very scary to go out. Every time you leave the shelter is a big risk.

On my way Hamas started to fire rockets. I hid my son Liam between my hands and my body.

My wife is a high-level nurse at Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon (another city in southern Israel), where everything is a mess. Unlike us, she leaves the house every day to go to work. The other day she removed a bullet from somebody's body. She's risking her life to leave the house to help people. She leaves the house wearing a helmet.

This morning my wife left for work today at 5 a.m. She came back at 8 p.m. She tells me that soldiers are arriving in operating rooms in critical conditions. Everyone is fighting for every soldier. The situation is terrible, simply terrible.

I worry for all my children, including my son Yehonathan. He has all of his heart and liver medications, but he couldn't go for his routine checkup because of the alarms, bombs and everything else that's going on. He needs to go to the doctor every 3 weeks.

In 2013 Yehonathan underwent a liver transplant at St. Luke's Hospital in Brussels, Belgium, and my wife donated a liver lobe to him. We were there for about a year. In 2014 we did a liver biopsy audit in Belgium. In 2016 he underwent heart surgery at Schneider Hospital in Petah Tikva, a failed operation, and was in a critical condition. The doctors did not give him any chance to live.

Two years later he underwent a complex 26-hour heart surgery at Stanford Hospital in the United States with the best doctors in the world. In 2020 Jonathan underwent another complex heart surgery at Stanford, a 20-hour operation. Today we are being monitored in the hospitals in Israel and of course we would like to do everything at Stanford but we don't have the option.

I have another child, 20, who's a fighter in an elite unit in the Israeli Defense Forces. My family and I always worry about him too.

The terrorists do not care about all the children and their suffering. We would give everything not to be here with the children. The world must know our suffering and the nightmares of these poor children.

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