Prime minister, wife, console family of slain police officer
Hadas Malka killed in Damascus Gate attack was ‘the child of us all and the hero for us all’ says Netanyahu
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara on Sunday visited the family of 23-year-old Hadas Malka, the Border Police officer who was killed in a terror attack at Damascus Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City on Friday.
The prime minister praised Malka and her family.
“We saw just now a wonderful family, a very fine family with deep love for the land and the state,” he said after the visit. “These things are so apparent when we see Hadas’s story, and it is totally clear where she grew up and the values she brought with her from such a home.”
Netanyahu said that he would never forget the words of David Malka, who told him that his daughter Hadas would often say, “You need to understand that if we are not there, then we will have no capital.”
Netanyahu said he replied: “Without these young people, we have no country. I bow my head and salute you, Hadas, our hero.”
“This is the child of us all and the hero for us all,” said Netanyahu.
Sara Netanyahu too praised Malka, calling her “a leader, a beautiful, talented girl, who was truly someone special.”
“Every mother and father in the State of Israel…, we all embrace Hadas’s mother and father, and brothers and sisters,” she said, adding that she told Malka’s parents that “they were truly privileged to have such a child.”
Sara Netanyahu also praised Hadar Cohen, a policewoman who was also killed at Damascus Gate more than a year ago. Malka wrote a Facebook last year in which she saluted Cohen.
“She didn’t know that she would suffer the same fate,” said Sara Netanyahu, “it is truly heartbreaking.”
According to a Border Police statement on Friday, Malka was part of a group of officers responding to sounds of gunfire near their area of patrol close to Damascus Gate, when she was attacked.
The gunfire was coming from an attack seconds earlier in which two Palestinian assailants attacked Border Police troops with a homemade Carlo sub-machine gun and knives, at Zedekiah’s Cave in the Muslim Quarter. Some reports said the gun used by the attackers jammed, preventing further casualties. The two attackers were killed.
While on her way to the scene, Malka was accosted by a third Palestinian with a knife.
“Hadas fought her attacker for several seconds, while he stabbed her repeatedly and while trying to reach for her weapon,” the statement read.
Nearby troops opened fire and killed him.
