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They first sensed something was wrong when they heard a military jet fly overhead. Once the sirens sounded, the Dooleys and their church group were escorted to a shelter built into a hillside.

“The closest area was the bathrooms, so they separated the men into the men’s rooms, and the women into the women’s restrooms. The ladies started praying, and the men were laughing and telling jokes,” Brittany Dooley, a physician assistant at UVA Health, said.

Shortly afterward, the group returned to their hotel, where they sheltered for days as church leaders weighed their options and the war evolved.

Matt and Brittany Dooley pose for a photo on the Mount of Olives. Not long after, they would hear sirens signifying that the war with Iran had begun. (Contributed photo)

In some ways, the couple had prepared for something like this. When they arrived in Tel Aviv, Matt even asked a local person what would happen in the event of an attack, since there were already reports of growing tension in the region.

“We went a day early and landed in Tel Aviv, and I struck up a conversation with our cab driver. I asked him, ‘If something were to happen, what’s the plan?’” Matt recalled. “He said, ‘The government has a plan. They would get you to Jordan and fly you home from there.’”

For the next several days, however, the Dooleys enjoyed a perfectly ordinary trip. Their church plans annual trips to Israel to visit places mentioned in the Bible, though it paused the trips for the last three years due to the Israel-Gaza war.

The Dooleys spent a day and a half exploring Tel Aviv and Jaffa, an ancient port city in southern Tel Aviv. On Feb. 25, the official church trip began. A group of 57 people, ranging in age from 10 to 89, toured Caesarea Maritima (built by Herod the Great), Mount Carmel and Megiddo, where the Battle of Armageddon is said to take place. They floated in the Dead Sea before arriving in Jerusalem on Feb. 27. The next morning, they visited the Mount of Olives.

Despite the violence and uncertainty of their situation, the Dooleys remembered a sense of relative calm.

“There were soldiers staying in the hotel for a training or a conference, so even though we didn’t know what was going to happen, we felt pretty safe,” said Matt Dooley, who works as a limited submissions coordinator in the Office of the Vice President for Research.

This safe room inside an Israeli hotel has reinforced walls and a steel door. The Dooleys sheltered here while their church group formulated evacuation plans. (Contributed photo)

They saw the effects of the war up close. An Israeli family was staying in the hotel after three of their four children were killed in a strike.

“I, myself, am not a very emotional person usually. … I held myself together and did OK until I saw that family in the lobby,” Brittany Dooley said.

It took days to develop a plan to leave. The airspace was immediately shut down, and traveling across a land border became impossible as well.

The Dooleys ride camels in Egypt, where they ultimately caught a flight back to the United States. (Contributed photo)

“Things were changing by the minute. Someone would come up with one plan, and they’d check on it, and a minute or two later, that plan was no longer good. So, someone would come up with another idea, and the same thing would happen, and that was Sunday night into Monday morning,” Matt Dooley said. “When Hezbollah started firing from Lebanon, our tour guide’s exact words were, ‘Your window of escape is quickly closing.’” 

They decided to travel south, to Egypt, since Iran was sending missiles from the east and Hezbollah from the north. A member of their congregation, Peter Snyder, a former Republican candidate for governor, had been working through various government channels to help the group get out safely. Eventually, U.S. Sen. Mark Warner arranged for officials from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to meet the church group at the border crossing.

The drive to Cairo was estimated to take 11 hours, following the route the State Department suggested.

“Our bus drivers got us there in nine hours,” Brittany Dooley said.

After a couple of days in Cairo, they took time to visit the pyramids, then hopped on a flight to begin their journey back to the United States, stopping first in London.

“The second the wheels touched the ground, all of that emotion in me just released,” Brittany Dooley said.

The journey wasn’t over, however. From London, they flew to Chicago, where customs agents briefly stopped Matt Dooley before being released. They finally made it to Charlottesville at 4 a.m. on March 7, a Saturday. They took the weekend to recuperate and were back to work on Monday.