Newly widowed mother tells her girls their father, brother are dead

Three young Israeli girls, aged 11, 9 and 5, were informed late Friday, hours after a deadly terror attack in the West Bank, that their father and older brother had been murdered.

None of names of the family members’ was cleared for publication.

The remaining members, a widowed mother, 16-year-old boy and three young girls were all lightly wounded, suffering mostly bruises and shrapnel injuries.

The mother, according to Channel 2, was assisted by professional staffers at the Soroka Hospital when she needed to muster the courage to break the news to her children.

The family was driving to a Shabbat Chatan, a Jewish ritual celebrated on the weekend preceding a wedding; the fourth daughter of the family was not in the car, preparing for her wedding.

According to Channel 2, one of the shooters, after critically wounding the family’s father, 40, and an 18-year-old son, came closer to fire a second bullet to confirm the kill. He did not fire at the girls. The 18-year-old even managed to call rescue services to report the attack before he was killed by further gunfire. It was left to his younger brother, 16 and now the family’s oldest male, to direct ambulances to the scene.

A senior surgeon at the Soroka hospital, Dr. Zvi Perry, recounted on Channel 2 how the girls learned the news of their loss: “It is a delicate process, accompanied by a diverse team of professionals – social workers and psychiatrists specializing in treating teenagers and children. The aim is firstly to understand what the patient feels and how much of the news they have understood. Not everyone knew and not everyone understood what had happened. With time, it was possible to explain to them, each girl in a language she understands. They are small girls, it affected the way we did this,” he said.

From a physical perspective, Perry said all of the wounded were in light condition. “The mother has bruises on her chest and limbs, the boy has shrapnel in his right calf, and the three girls have light scratches and bruises,” he said. They were released home shortly before 9 p.m., having been accompanied by the hospital’s team of psychiatrists.

Hamas media outlets celebrated the murders. It claimed the killers “were merciful” to the children in accordance with the dictates of Islam. Channel 2 suggested that dark windows on the family’s van may have meant the gunmen did not realize there were children in the back seats.

A similar claim was made by one of the suspects in the murder of the Henkin couple, who were shot to death in the front seat of their car as their children were sitting in the back. The Henkin murder on October 1 is unofficially considered the starting point of the recent round of Palestinian terrorism. While Hamas did not claim responsibility for the attack, it called for more such “acts of heroism.”

Head of the Mount Hebron Regional Council, Yochai Damri, said the family are “an innocent family who were driving to observe the Shabbat and regrettably near the area of Samua lowly murderers opened fire at them. The flowers they brought for Shabbat were stained with the blood of the murdered – it looks like [the terrorists] confirmed the kill. There was a Red Crescent ambulance that sadly did not alight to take care of the wounded, as if these were dogs and not people. But these are our neighbors, behaving like savages, not like humans.”