An Israeli family’s drive home turned into a nightmare Monday as a Palestinian man attempted to kidnap a teenage daughter.
The brazen attacker tried to drag the 14-year-old from her family’s car in front of her mother and a six-year-old sister.
The mother, who gave her name only as Michal, recalled the traumatic incident Tuesday in an interview with Kol B’Rama radio.
The incident occurred as the family was stuck in traffic, she said. Their home is in Adam, north of Jerusalem, past a stretch of road known for heavy traffic jams.
“Suddenly we saw a group of four [Palestinian] men walking past my car. The last one simply opened the door and began dragging my girl from the car,” she related.
“She fought back. As soon as he saw she was wearing a seatbelt, he tried… He was on top of her trying to open the seatbelt and she was hitting him. I started hitting him, too,” she continued.
There were no bags or valuables in the car, she noted. “He just tried to drag her. We started to scream and shout, we were hitting him in the face.
“Nobody responded,” she recalled. “Not from in front, or from behind. And you can’t move, because on one side there’s the [Palestinian Arab] village, there’s a car behind you, a car in front, and the security fence on the other side. You can’t go anywhere.
“You scream your head off, and nobody comes to help,” she said.
Thankfully, the attacker left. “He saw that we were resisting him, and screaming, and we were on the phone with a friend who heard us screaming and called the security commander and my husband,” she explained.
“Apparently he heard that we were hysterical, and with how we were hitting him, we were punching him in the face. My daughter was great, she really hit him hard,” she recalled.
As soon as she could, the mother reported the incident to police who were directing traffic. Additional police and IDF forces arrived “within seconds,” as did the security commander from Adam, she said.
While the danger passed, she said, the trauma remains. “We have a lot of anxiety. I had another little girl, six years old, who saw what happened. She was afraid he would open her door. She’s dealing with some serious trauma.”
“This is our home, this is our country. We need to drive here. But lock your doors,” she concluded. Michal refrained from proposing other solutions, saying, “That’s beyond me.”