TEL AVIV – Two Israelis assisted in subduing terrorists from Tuesday’s rampage in improbable ways – the first by pulling the attacker’s knife from his own neck and stabbing him with it; and the second, in a separate attack, by smashing the terrorist over the head with his guitar.
After Yonatan Azarihab was stabbed multiple times Tuesday afternoon in a grocery store in Petah Tikva, he extracted the knife from his neck and stabbed his attacker, eventually killing him.
“It’s a miracle, I wasn’t at all prepared for anything like that,” the ultra-Orthodox father of five told Ynet from his hospital bed.
“I was inside the store and all of the sudden I felt someone jump on me. I didn’t realize what was happening until someone yelled ‘terrorist’ and I saw the knife in his hand,” he added.
Eighteen-year-old terrorist Abed el-Rahman Mahmoud Radad followed Azarihab into a store while the latter was collecting money for charity. He stabbed him multiple times in the upper body in what police called a “frenzied attack.”
“I immediately knew I had to engage him so that he wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone else,” Azarihab said.
Azarihab said he recited the Jewish proverb, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” as he flung the assailant onto a drinks display in the store.
“He was still stabbing at that point,” he said, but claimed that God gave him the strength to fight back.
“If God didn’t want me to be in this place right now, then I wouldn’t be here. I thought today was my last, but I’m still here.”
A few hours later, another Palestinian terrorist went on a stabbing rampage in Jaffa, wounding ten and killing an American tourist. Twenty-six-year-old musician Yishai Montgomery, who was busking on the boardwalk, tried to stop the attacker from escaping by hitting him over the head with his guitar.
“I saw a man in a grey shirt running towards me after hearing screams and lots of yelling nearby,” Montgomery told Ynet.
“All of a sudden I realized he had a knife. He jumped on the bench yelling at me and trying to stab me so I grabbed my guitar and hit him over the head as hard as I could.”
Even though Montgomery’s guitar was left destroyed, it wasn’t enough to stop the 22-year-old assailant.
“He was so stunned and didn’t know what to do with himself and then started running away,” he said.
Montgomery chased him down the boardwalk loudly yelling “terrorist” as loud as he could until security forces arrived at the scene.
“I knew there were wounded people on the beach, but staying there with them seemed less important then,” Montgomery said.
The terrorist attacked people at three different locations in Jaffa and southern Tel Aviv before police forces shot him dead.
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