64-year-old Neve Yaakov stabbing victim recounts attack from Jerusalem hospital bed

Speaking from his hospital bed in Hadassah Medical Center after he was injured in a terror attack at a bus station in Jerusalem’s Neve Yaakov neighborhood, 64-year-old Tzvi Tal recounts the moment he realized he had been stabbed.

“I was waiting at the station for my bus and suddenly I felt someone slap me on the back,” he tells the press. “I turned around and saw that he was running away, and I felt like something had been left in my back and realized that there was a knife there.”

As he was alone at the bus stop at the time, he says he resorted to trying to flag down cabs and other vehicles in the street to seek help, although many passed by without stopping as the knife wasn’t visible to them and they didn’t realize what had happened.

He says that the perpetrator of the attack, a 14-year-old boy, had been at the bus station with him and he assumed that he had also been waiting for the bus, but in the end “he was waiting for me.”

Tal, an ultra-Orthodox Jew, says “we’re sitting on a powder keg” in Jerusalem, and attributed his escape with relatively minor injures to a higher power.

“The reason things like this don’t happen every other second is because someone is watching over us, making sure that it doesn’t,” he says.