Bereaved husband: 'Tze'ela is still teaching us how to cope with tragedy'

Hananel Gez, the husband of the pregnant woman who was murdered while driving to the hospital to give birth tells Arutz Sheva Jewish residents are "sitting ducks" until the government acts to protect them.

Arutz Sheva spoke with Hananel Gez, the husband of Tze'ela Gez, a week after his wife was murdered in a terrorist shooting attack while on her way to the hospital to give birth.

Hananel was wounded himself during the attack, and doctors continue to fight to save the life of the child who had to be delivered via emergency cesarean section. "He's in a very difficult situation, a very critical situation," Hananel said of the baby. "He's on life support. We don't know what's going to happen with him."

With tears in his eyes, Hananel said, "We hope he's going to be ok. We have to pray a lot [and] we need a big miracle."

"I can only say that I was married to an angel and I'm blessed to have shared a beautiful life with her," he said of Tze'ela. "11 years we were married. She was an angel, she would always think about how to help people all the time; whether it's people that needed therapy and she was able to give them therapy, with anxiety, depression, trauma, and post-trauma, so many different types of things that she helped people with."

He added that Tze'ela was always willing to help others in their community. "If a neighbor needed something, she was always the first to jump and say, 'I have sugar, I have chocolate, I have eggs. I'll help you.'"

Hananel said that he is continuing to learn from the messages and recordings Tze'ela left behind. "We're learning so much from her even after her death. We're getting chizuk (strength) from her, we're getting stronger from her. We're learning how to cope with tragedy, we're learning how to cope with trauma."

Following his wife's murder, Hananel has demands for the government and the security forces to better protect the residents of the area."It's very clear that we're sitting ducks. This is just gonna continue happening again and again. We have that wishful thinking that, 'No, don't talk like that. It's not gonna happen anymore.' Unfortunately, when I'm sitting shiva and people come to me with stories that they lost loved ones to terrorist attacks, they don't tell me it was 40 years ago and now it's happening again. They don't tell me it was 20 years ago and it's happening again. They're telling me it was last year and a few months ago."

"My demand is for the government and the head of the government and for the security [officials] that's in the cabinet, verybody that is in charge making the laws and the rules ... They have to understand: if you have cancer in the body, you don't take out one or two or five percent. You don't take 20 percent, you don't take 99 percent. You do chemotherapy until you get 100 percent of the cancer out of the body. Which means that every Arab Muslim that openly says that he is anti-Jewish and he is celebrating our death, and that's a lot of Arabs in Israel. I'm not saying a hundred percent of the Arabs, because there are Arabs that are pro-Israel and they're even in the army and even in the police force. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that all the Muslim Arabs that are radical thinking, and there are unfortunately so many villages, thousands of villages, that are waiting to do the next terrorist attack and are planning and are continuing to teach their children. We cannot allow them to live in this country. Period."

"This is not your land if you're going to kill people that live here and deserve to live here. This is the Jewish land. We're not gonna sit around and be ducks," Hananel said.

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