'Will kill again': Israeli terror survivor faces emotional battle as murderer released from prison

The government did not call Tal Hartuv to tell her that the terrorist who shattered 30 of her bones, left 18 jagged stab wounds, and murdered her friend was being released. Nor did it notify the family of Kristine Luken, the murdered Christian American tourist who had only been visiting Israel. The responsibility of delivering the devastating news fell instead to the British olah herself.

She first told the identical twin sister of Luken and then delivered the news to their parents; their daughter’s murderer was free.

Hartuv learned the news from a journalist and still does not know where Fatafta was released. She must deal with the anxiety that they may one day cross paths,

Speaking from her home in Israel on a busy day lined up with interviews, Hartuv recounted how only 10 minutes before the attack began, the men approached Hartuv and Luken, asking for water. In Israel’s heat, such a request was hardly unusual, yet something about the men unsettled Hartuv. She discreetly readied her penknife, anticipating a possible robbery, and urged Luken to return to the path they had strayed from.

As they started back down the trail, Hartuv’s mind was already racing through ways to keep them safe, but before she could act, the terrorists pounced. They forced both women to the ground, breaking Hartuv’s nose in the process.

Even pinned down and overpowered, Hartuv fought back. She managed to stab one of the attackers with her penknife, “nicking him in the balls,” she later recalled. That small amount of blood would prove crucial, allowing police to identify the assailants through Israel’s DNA database.

Desperate to survive, Hartuv tried to reason with the men. She promised them her car, claiming it was a Mercedes. When that failed, she told them both she and her friend were only tourists, a lie quickly exposed when they found her Israeli ID card in her purse. Thinking fast, she instructed Luken to fake a seizure, warning the attackers that it would cause uncontrollable screaming. Instead, they pressed a knife to Luken’s throat and ordered her to stop shaking.

Asked what goes through someone’s mind in such a situation, Hartuv answered that the response came in stages. First, she froze, then fought, and finally, when she and Luken were gagged and bound, felt a calm acceptance that can only come when death seems inevitable.

“The biggest moment [of fear] was when they forced us to our knees. And that’s the moment I understood he was going to behead me,” she said. “In that moment, I’m thinking about how he’s going to do it. Is he going to chop off my head? Is he going to saw it off? And my only prayer then really was, just make it quick. But at that moment, the moment of death, it’s like you’re emptied. You’re emptied of everything that makes you who you are.”

“Too scared to be frightened,” Hartuv listened as the men shouted “Allahu akbar,” feeling each impalement. In that instant, she said, two thoughts filled her mind: the absurdity that her cause of death would be murder, and the aching awareness of the loved ones she would never again hold, see, or speak to. The entire attack lasted less than an hour, but it would take years of recovery.

“I never thought I was going to be murdered,” she said, reflecting on how absurd the situation had been to her. “And the other thing I was thinking about was the people I loved. I was worried for them. How are they going to feel? What about when they get the news? That’s all I could think of.”

Acutely aware of her severe wounds, it wasn’t survival that pushed Hartuv to move; it was the thought of being found. She had already accepted death, but she wanted her body to be discovered. Despite the agony of standing with her arms tied behind her back, her wounds bleeding freely, she forced herself to rise, only to collapse again and again. Still, she pressed on, barefoot, gagged, bound, and bleeding, driven by a single thought: she wanted to be closer to where the police could find her body.

The idea of removing an active threat to others gave her strength. She soldiered on with 30 broken bones, shattered ribs, 18 machete wounds, a sliced diaphragm, a collapsed lung, a dislocated shoulder, a crushed sternum, and bone splinters piercing her lung.

“And each time I tried [to get up], I fell, and I just wanted to sleep. And what is sleep? It’s death,” she said. “Nothing actually hurts anymore at this point. I just felt very warm, very resolved to my fate, but also determined to just die nearer, so they can be caught quicker.”

A professional pianist, Hartuv imagined her hands playing the chords to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as she walked. “It was written by Jews just before the Second World War,” she said, speaking on the composition by Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen. “And I’m really walking this path of death, saying to myself, C minor seven, G flat; I mean, these are all chords. And that’s how I managed to walk over a mile.”

Hartuv eventually stumbled across a family having a picnic. In the evening light, the parents didn’t initially notice her approaching but still she chose to take a few more steps, even in her condition, electing to risk not being seen over potentially traumatizing the young children.

“I thought I better just veer off to the left where the children are, away from the kids, because if the kids see me, they’re going to be traumatized for life,” she shared, explaining how the five extra meters to stumble felt like 500. “I did that at risk in that the adults won’t see me, in order that also the children won’t see me. But I need the adults to see me. So it was these choiceless choices in that moment, and then as I’m approaching the picnic table, they still don’t look up, and the sun is getting lower, and my shadow crept across their picnic table, and this woman looks up and she screams, and I collapse right there on the ground.”

Finally with people, Hartuv still did not pray to survive. She had accomplished what she set out to do: be found and give the police precious hours to prevent the terrorists from attacking another person.

“I wanted to be with my Maker, make my peace,” she admitted. “The next thing I know, I’m a pile of flesh, quivering flesh, and my ears on the ground and the vibrations, and there are people stomping around, and somebody’s calling the ambulance, somebody’s calling the army, and then I hear the chopping blade of a helicopter. And after a few minutes, the ambulance turns up, you know, the smell of exhaust and fumes and just chaos, chaos everywhere. And I never lost consciousness. I was conscious, conscious from that moment until I went into the operating theater.”

An Arab surgeon saved her life in the operating theater, and she began her long journey to heal physically.

When she appeared in court much later, one of the terrorists confessed to murdering a woman 10 months before attacking Hartuv and murdering Luken. In front of a judge, they testified that they murdered Luken only because they believed she was a Jew.

“I went for a walk. I went for that walk in the forest. I was Jewish, and I walked out of that forest a Jew,” she reflected. “There’s a big difference. And after the attack, I thought, I love my people, I love my history, I love my culture, I love my Judaism. I’m so proud to be Jewish....

“And then there was this little parenthesis, and I always thought: What if they are released in a deal? It would feel like unrequited love. You know, when you love a country so much, it’s like when you love a guy so much and he’s beautiful and he just doesn’t quite love you in the same way, right? And that’s what I felt that it would be like.

“I don’t think we should ever negotiate with terrorists, ever. And we are going to see these terrorists murder again, because they say so,” she asserted.

“I can be happy for [the hostages and their families] and I can be raging for myself,” she explained, giving insight into the complex range of emotions she feels. “Right now, that is the dialogue, the discourse in Israeli society we have. We’ve paid a price for this. We’re celebrating, and we should, but we know that, down the road, these terrorists are going to murder again.... One situation doesn’t resolve the other. The joy doesn’t resolve the rage or mollify anything. But as a society, we have to hold these things in unison, the unfairness of it all, and the compassion that we should extend to the hostages, and if we don’t hold it intentionally, it’s going to break.”

While relieved that many have been reunited with loved ones after two long years of war and trauma, Hartuv said that the international community had forced Israel to make a deal that promised only future grief by restricting alternative means to force Hamas to release the hostages. In doing so, she said, other nations forced Israel to make a decision that they themselves would never make.

“From October 8, there’s been a moral abandonment of Israel [which] started in Western civilization,” she said. “It’s one thing to say ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists,’ all good and fair, but I feel that Israel has been pushed into a corner over two years....”

Beyond allowing people to march calling for an intifada and celebrate the greatest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, foreign governments “which said they’re friends of Israel, we stand by Israel’s right to defend itself,” have “tied our hands behind our back” in the war, she said.

Israel was only given a “window of opportunity” to respond, an expectation never placed on Ukraine after the Russian invasion, Hartuv said. “We know there’s terrible pressure to do things in the nick of time, and people were already warning us about putting boots on the ground before we even went in [Gaza]. So we have mixed messages from governments that claim they support Israel, but they tie our hands behind our backs.”

Acknowledging that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in a difficult position, Hartuv said that he should have gathered a coalition of European leaders and put to them that the way to avoid a full-blown war like we’ve seen is to use pressure. That pressure, she said, would have been a tight restriction on food and water entering the Gaza Strip until the hostages were released.

While the early days of the war had seen Israel enact a similar strategy, international pressure forced Israel to give in little by little, she said. The world failed to pressure Hamas to give up the hostages, leaving Israel little choice but to fight in a war, which ultimately led to a decline in Israel’s public image.

“So whichever way Israel turned, because of this moral corrosion in the West and the cowardly, cowardly, cowardice of the West, the media, and the governments, we were forced, ultimately, slowly, after two years, to actually release these murderers,” she conceded. “So I find everybody complicit in that, not the prime minister, not President Trump, actually, but the West.”

Even the language used by the media is a perversion of Jewish values used to detract sympathy for Israel, Hartuv said. “They’ve charged us with the violation of one of the commandments with all these deaths in Gaza. What’s that commandment? Thou shalt not murder... and we have been very lazy and we haven’t caught on to that. We should have been saying that, in Hebrew, there are two different words [for kill and murder]. This is a war. This is not a genocide. People die. There is killing, and there’s nothing morally wrong with that in a war situation.”

Hartuv stressed that when the government declared the war was only against Hamas, it glossed over the complicity of the many different factions in Palestinian society.

“You can see it from the terrorist GoPro footage.... You saw it at that obscene, grotesque release of the Bibas family. All these terrorists had different headbands, and every color headband is a different faction or terrorist group. So you have the PFLP, Islamic Jihad, [and] Fatah. The war isn’t just against Hamas.”

Apart from the terrorist groups, there were “people in civilian clothes who raped and pillaged and burned. Then you had thousands more waiting in Gaza to take the dead and the alive [hostages]. And then, at the release ceremony, you had thousands more in civilian clothes. And if you look at the extent of the tunnels, all these innocent civilians, you want to tell me that somebody just cooking a little bit of laffa bread didn’t know that somebody was digging a tunnel under the kitchen? They’ve turned a blind eye. And every hostage who’s come back says there are no innocent civilians in Gaza.”

Israel failed to address the Palestinian civilian involvement in the preparation of, during, and in the aftermath of, the massacre, Hartuv accused. Regardless of how the country virtual signals, she said that “it’s time to learn, though, that no matter what we do as Jews, people are not going to like us.”

Hartuv warned that this current pause was not the end of the war, but with the calm, the government needs to sit down and really think about hasbara and how to hold on to the nation’s “moral integrity by telling the truth.”

Hartuv has an identity that extends far beyond being a survivor. She is a Yad Vashem educator, avid bird lover, musician, and writer.

Still, since Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan came into effect, Hartuv has reopened painful chapters of her life with international media, appearing on Piers Morgan Uncensored and meeting with public figures like Tommy Robinson to share her story. She had previously shared details of her physical and emotional rehabilitation in her book, The Rage Less Traveled: A Memoir of Surviving a Machete Attack.