Scene of the incident
Scene of the incidentMDA

Boris, a resident of Bat Yam who was stabbed on Sunday afternoon in the city of Jaffa by a Palestinian from Jenin who was in Israel illegally, is now in Wolfson Medical Center being treated for his wounds, which were defined as moderate. At his side sits his wife, Tatiana, who was with him at the time of the attack.

“I felt something like a shadow from behind me,” Boris told Channel 12 News. “Then someone jumped on me and I felt a heavy blow. It was a terrorist – I saw it in his eyes,” he added.

Boris recounted the moments of the attack: “After that first heavy blow he hit me again, and then I saw him turn to my wife. I grabbed her by the arm and threw her to the ground and stood between her and the terrorist, while he continued to hit me.”

Boris then started to hit back and to cry out for help and push the terrorist away from him. “It looked like he wasn’t expecting me to do that, and he started to run off,” he said.

“Then my wife yelled that we had to run away, but after running for about 50 meters, I just dropped. I felt terrible. A neighbor who lives opposite us had seen everything and she came out to help us,” he said, noting that by that stage, they had realized that they had been the victims of a terrorist attack and not an attempted robbery. “He didn’t want anything. He wanted to commit a terrorist act – he was a terrorist. I could see it in his eyes.”

Tatiana stressed that she and her husband had been taking walks to Jaffa and other places for years, but that now, “I’m in shock at what happened. I had trouble sleeping last night. I don’t want to go there again – I’m going to stay in Bat Yam.”

The terrorist has since been identified as an 18-year-old Palestinian from Jenin. He was arrested shortly after the attack on a nearby street. Police summoned to the scene have opened an investigation, and their findings so far have strengthened the case for designating this incident as a nationalistically motivated attack. The GSS has now been formally coopted into the investigation.