Diary of a War Dad, Day 101: My Daughter Witnesses a Terror Attack
Hamas terrorist rams a car into a group of schoolchildren waiting for the bus home. My daughter was just around the corner.
Yesterday was too close. We got lucky. My Abigail, 10, was approaching the bus stop she goes to after school to catch the bus home. Just moments before she got there this happened:
Abby was walking to the bus stop a block away from her school, at the corner of Yerushalaim and Ahuza Streets, the two main streets in Ra’anana. Plenty of other school children were there waiting for their bus home. She saw people lying on the floor. people screaming and falling. Huge numbers of police and ambulance cars. Someone screamed at her to get back. Later, we understood it was probably a plainclothes police officer.
Abby called me. It was a video call. The look on my brave girl’s face will never leave me. I asked her to hold the phone up so I could see where she was; told her I was on my way on my electric scooter. I got there in about 8 minutes, knowing my Abby was alive and whole, but also that she is at the scene of a terror attack that wasn’t over yet.
The ride over seemed like an eternity. Why don’t I have a motorbike?
Police cars were tearing past me in the opposite direction. Where were they headed? There was another suspect on the loose, in the direction I had come from.
My wife also called Abby. An adult answered the phone. that was scary —someone else answering your child’s phone during a terror attack. The adult said he was taking our daughter to a family house nearby. There were other children there. She was safe. Others weren’t so lucky. One woman was killed, others were seriously wounded, including one of Abby’s friends.
I got to the scene. scooted through a police cordon, plenty of uniformed and plainclothes police, guns drawn. Through a passage into a side street to a house where I got to my daughter. Complete strangers had taken in my child, and other children, sheltered and comforted them. What other country in the world would complete strangers hug, shelter, and comfort random children until their guardians came for them?
My strong and beautiful Abigail looked pale and shaken. she wanted to go home, now! to get off the streets. A grumpy old man shouted at us: it’s not over, there are more terrorists, get off the street! That wasn’t helpful.
About 90 minutes after it started, the double ramming and knife attack in my quiet little town was over. The two suspects were apprehended. Hamas claimed it as a “glorious resistance operation”. Soon after, all the debris was removed, cordons lifted, roads opened, and life resumed as usual.
This has even been given an official name: Routine Emergency. Meaning, we are living in a time of emergency which has become routine, our norm. Our usual. Nothing out of the ordinary. Keep calm and carry a gun. This is what living in Sparta is like.
Later that evening we got Abby some timely help. The therapist asked her to draw what she saw at the scene, in detail, to get it all out of her head and on to paper.
Abby’s much better. We got lucky with this therapist. The trauma session did the trick. How many children are not getting trauma therapy?
Abigail is a tough, sensitive, inquisitive, and brilliant little girl. We’ll help her turn this into resilience. //
This is what I’ve most been worried about since Day 1 of this war.
True, the rockets from Gaza were scary. We had several runs to the bomb shelter over the past 100 days. Looming war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, if it happens, would be 10X worse.
But apart from one rocket intercepted over Ra’anana and the shrapnel that fell here, our sleepy suburban bubble hasn’t been blasted anywhere near what’s happened in Tel Aviv, let alone the Southern and Northern border areas. Those towns have been hit hard, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been internally displaced.
Ra’anana is, was, considered a safe city. There have been terror attacks here in the past, but not in this war so far. That ended Monday. This is the big fear in these parts: that apart from Gaza in the South and Lebanon in the North, the Central Front will explode into violence. Haaretz reports that IDF Central Command is worried about a possible loss of control in the West Bank.
Hard to tell where this is all going.
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