Gilboa et. al. (2018 v. IIA:70-72) described the evidence for this supposed destruction event as somewhat ambiguous. Room 9816 contained stones and broken pottery stemming from a wall collapse as well as a victim - a skeleton of a 35-40 year old woman sometimes known in the literature as "Doreen". Stones were found on her head, ribs, pelvis and legs, her neck was severed and her spine possibly pushed into the brain case. Her hands were raised to her face and her skull was crushed. She appears to have died due to a wall collapse.

Elsewhere, signs of destruction were less conclusive or altogether lacking. Room 9191 contained an extensive assemblage of pottery in seemingly primary deposition that may indicate a sudden end, while Room 9661 contained pottery that was evidently crushed on a surface, but restoration produced only few complete or near-complete vessels . Other rooms yielded no clear evidence of destruction.

Stewart (1993), who supervised the excavation of Doreen, interpreted the evidence differently, arguing that the Phase 7 destruction was probably caused by an earthquake. He cited the woman’s violent death, valuable objects buried beneath rubble, and a neat line of smashed pots in the room next door, right alongside a soil change, just as if they had fallen off a now-vanished bench. In the same issue, Stern (1993), the excavation director, offered a different explanation—interpreting Doreen’s death as a casualty of armed conflict (as quoted by Nur 2008: 146–149).

Phase 7 began in Iron IB and ended during the transition from Iron I to Iron II. Gilboa et al. (2018 v. IIA: 72) noted that the pottery assemblage in Room 9191 likely belongs to the final subphase (7a). According to their chronological chart (Chart 1), this would place the destruction between 1000 and 925 BCE using a high chronology, or between 925 and 875 BCE using a low chronology. Considering both models, the event is constrained to 1000–875 BCE, and possibly as early as 1050 BCE if it occurred earlier in Phase 7.