'Very difficult to stop': BBC visits scene of Iran cluster bomb strike on Israel

It was late at night when an Iranian cluster bomb flew through the ceiling of an elderly couple's apartment in central Israel and exploded in their tiny living room, killing them both.

The path of the bomb was still clearly mapped onto the ash-covered debris left behind. A large hole in the ceiling of their top-floor apartment marked where it punched through, forcing broken concrete and metal rods inwards.

Shrapnel holes across the back walls showed the force of the explosion, which destroyed the front of the apartment - leaving it open to the street outside.

Inside, a walking frame lay upended on the floor under the ash-covered furniture and rubble.

"We heard three noisy interceptions, but on the fourth one, we knew it was our house," said Sigal Amir, who lives next door and was sheltering in her safe room when the explosion hit.

"There was a massive boom and I felt a pain in my ear from the blast," she said. "The neighbours live five metres from us – their door was blown off and their house was full of dust like snow."

She said the couple had not been in the shelter when the bomb hit as one of them had mobility issues.

Deaths from Iran's daily missile attacks have been rare in Israel, with air defences intercepting most of them. But cluster bombs disperse over a wide area and are much harder to defend against, even when the missile carrying them is shot down.

As the war has gone on, Iran has shifted to using more of them.

"You can see the entry point of the rocket that flew all the way from Iran in a huge missile, and broke into dozens of pieces," said Israeli military spokesman Lt Col Nadav Shoshani during a visit to the site. "We had dozens of impact points like this in central Israel."

He said that while Israel had intercepted the missiles carrying cluster bombs, each carried 20 to 80 munitions, which were "very difficult to stop".

While we were there, another alarm sounded, warning of incoming missiles. The neighbour, Sigal, beckoned us into her safe room.