Terror attack in Sbarro restaurant
Terror attack in Sbarro restaurantIsrael news photo: Flash 90

Eyal Lerner of Raanana, who was poisoned along with his wife and baby son by Arabs, told journalists on Sunday: "Our case is no different from the terror bombings at Sbarro and the Dolphinarium." 

He was referring to infamous terror attacks in 2001 that took the lives of dozens of innocent Jewish men, women, youths and children.

Last November, Lerner, his wife Yifat and their two and half-year-old son, as well as a volunteer policeman, drank filtered water and grapefruit juice that had been laced with poison by Arab terrorist burglars. He was hospitalized in serious condition until making a full recovery.

He told reporters Sunday that while he feels good now, "it will take me a long time to forget that day."

On the evening of the burglary during which the drinks in his home were poisoned, he said, "I called my wife, I told her about the break-in, and she came home and called the police. At a certain point I had a soft drink and after the police came, I started feeling nausea and felt like I was going to faint."

"After I collapsed, a Magen David Adom team evacuated me to hospital. For three days I was anaesthetized and respirated, and only when I woke up did I realize that I, my wife and my child had been poisoned, along with the volunteer policeman."

Lerner was summoned for questioning several times during the police investigation of the poisoning-burglary. "They kept on asking us if we had enemies and who could have poisoned us," he recalled. "We kept on saying that we have no enemies. We are a normative family, we have no debts or feuds."

Lerner said that the three suspects had not been directly employed by the family, but by a contractor who gave services to the new home in which they lived. "Regrettably," he said, "this is not the first time that our home is broken into, and being burglarized is a terrible feeling, but this time the feeling was worse because they wanted to hurt us and the children."

He was careful not to make generalizations about Arabs, despite his ordeal. "I do not want to besmirch an entire nation, but today we are more fearful and we lock the house better, but we have no fear of Arabs whom we see," he added. "I want to convey a message to whoever intends to perpetrate similar deeds, that he will be caught in the end. I am giving the interview in order to deter and also to say thank you to the Kfar Saba police that solved our case. We realize that we were in great danger. We live in a country where reality is not simple but I do not want to blame all of the Arabs."