By Ariel Zorrowski
Dafna Meir, who attempted to fight off attacker, suffered multiple stab wounds, including to her head. The funeral procession for Dafna Meir, a 38-year old nurse and mother of six, began Monday morning in the village of Otniel where she was brutally murdered by a suspected Palestinian terrorist in her home on Sunday night.
Father & son reciting Kadish at the funeral of their wife/mother, stabbed to death by Arab terrorist.
The funeral procession began in Otniel at 9 am and will then head to the Har Hamenuhot cemetery in Givat Shaul, in Jerusalem where she will be laid to rest. She leaves behind her husband and six children, two of whom, both below the age of five, she was fostering. Israel’s Jerusalem Post named her children as Renana, 17, Akiva, 15, Noa, 11, Ahava, 10, Yair, 6, Yaniv 4.
Meir, who attempted to fight off the unidentified attacker, suffered multiple stab wounds, including to her head. Her eldest daughter Renana, witnessed the attack and fled upstairs with two of her younger siblings and called her father, Natan. She worked as a nurse in the neurosurgery department at Beersheba’s Soroka Medical Center as well as a pre-martial counselor for new brides, Israel’s Ynet news reported. Ynet quoted Meir’s friend Liron Steinberg as saying that she “was a woman who enjoyed life, the wittiest woman I know.”
“She always looked for how to help. If it was to take two foster kids, or as a nurse in the neurosurgery department. I work as a social worker in the Beit Hagai youth village and she would always invite home kids who didn’t have where else to be,” Steinberg said.
Yohai Damari, the head of the Hebron Hills Regional Council said that Meir “defended with all her soul the three children who were home. Otniel has seen these kinds of incidents. Otniel is in deep mourning and is prepared for the coming ones. We will only grow from this despicable murder. Nothing will stop us.” “A terrorist murdered a civilian in her home in the community of Otni’el,” south of Hebron, a military statement said. “The attacker broke into the house and stabbed the victim to death. Forces are in pursuit of the terrorist.”
Two days before her death Meir wrote an article in her community’s weekend bulletin where she described feeling insecure because of the recent wave of violence, Israel’s Jerusalem Post reported on Monday. “Lately, I have had a lot of objections in light of the security situation, thoughts about what is necessary and what is unnecessary to do, about fears, about my husband and children,” she wrote. “The situation is not easy and sometimes it feels like Russian Roulette.”
Following the attack, the Israeli Defense Forces as well as police launched a manhunt for the attacker, setting up checkpoints and declaring the settlement was closed military zone. According to Israel’s Channel 2 news, five Palestinians have already been arrested by security forces who are checking if they may be linked to the attack. The Shin Bet confirmed on Monday that the attack is believed to have been helped by another individual who waited in a getaway car.
The army said it believed the attacker then fled to the Palestinian village of Khirbet Karameh, in the south Hebron hills just north of the settlement of Otniel. This is the the first attack in the current wave of violence to take place inside a settlement home. The last time Palestinian terrorists carried out a fatal attack inside a settlement was in March 2011 when five members of the Fogel family, including their three-month old daughter, were stabbed to death in their home in the settlement of Itamar.
Via: I24News
Ed-Malki Dvir writes: I am hearing amazing stories come directly from Renana Meir, the oldest daughter of Daphna Meir HY”D. According to what Renana told her friend (whose family I know) her father Natan was out taking her brother to a doctors appointment in Gush Etzion. She saw the terrorist attack her mother and her mother fighting him off with all her strength so as to not to let the terrorist come into the house and hurt the rest of the children. At a certain point, The terrorists eyes met with Renana’s eyes and she just knew he was going to lunge and attack her and her siblings, but the knife was stuck in the mother, he continued to try and pull the knife out of Daphna but it would not come out. All the while Daphna was screaming and raising alert and the terrorist fearing he would get caught, eventually gave up and ran away. Renana credits her mothers heroic actions for saving her and her family and preventing what could have very well be another entire family massacre, similar to to Fogel murders. May Daphna Meir’s memory be blessed and may her killer be brought to swift justice.
ה’ יקום דמה מיד
יהי זכרה ברוך
You can read Dafne’s blog here and see her own prayer for herself translated as follows:
May it be thy will, Creator of the World, who manages it with mercy and compassion, that you entitle me to distribute medication to those of Israel, thy nation, who need to be rescued, and also to those of the other nations who are receiving the treatment of your faithful messengers, that keep up the holy work, day and night, on the Sabbath days and on holidays, tirelessly,
Entitle me please to understand, to know and to always remember that the medicines are your gift, and act under your vocation,
Entitle me please to observe and rejoice in the beneficial effects that these medicines, which I will distribute with mercy to the ill patients, will have,
Entitle me please to distribute the medication while being aware and fully concentrated, and while understanding the underlying therapeutic mechanisms by which the medicine affects the disease,
Entitle me please to notice any and every mistake and error, of my own and those of my friends in the line of medication distribution, and to act rapidly to correct it, before the medicine reaches the body of the ill patient,
Entitle me please to always act humbly, to learn and teach others of the successes and failures in medication dispensing,
Entitle me please to distribute medicine to ill patients from the state of my own robust and excellent health, and to give thanks for the fact that I, myself, am not taking those medications.
Entitle me please to sympathize, from the standing point of my own health, with the ill patients and their suffering, and to help them, in the very best way I can, with the tools that you give me, day after day and hour by hour
Amen
Translation by Moshe – IsraeliCool
Natan Meir eulogizes his wife Dafna, who was murdered by a terrorist in her home yesterday (in Hebrew). “We met when we were soldiers, at the south Lebanon border. It only took us a moment to fall in love,” Natan said. “My Dafna, thank you for every moment I had with you. Our love is too strong to be a passing thing. Dafna was one in a million.”
Dafna Meir’s eldest daughter Renana and Dafna’s adoptive mother Atara eulogize the woman who was murdered outside her home in Otniel yesterday (in Hebrew).
“I’m sorry that in your hardest moments I was unable to help you,” says Renana, who was with her mother when the terrorist attacked. “I remember the first time you came to us, I wanted to hug you and you took two steps back, you weren’t able, I guess you didn’t know what love is and what family is,” says adoptive mother Atara, who inspired Dafna to take two foster children into her own home.
This is what her children witnesses in their home. May they recover from this trauma. Jewish blood – killed for being Jewish.
[The opinions, facts and any media content are presented solely by the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Jewish Media Agency.]
