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October 8, 2018 2:19 pm
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Survivor Recalls Shooting Attack at Israeli Factory in West Bank

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Sara Vaturi, who survived Sunday’s shooting attack at a factory in the Barkan Industrial Park. Photo: Screenshot.

The Israeli woman who survived Sunday’s deadly terrorist attack in the West Bank recalled for reporters on Monday the moments of horror she experienced.

Speaking from her hospital bed as she recovered from a gunshot wound, 54-year-old Sara Vaturi described what transpired at the Alon Group factory in the Barkan Industrial Park the previous day, “I came to work in the morning as usual, I said good morning to everybody.”

Later, Vaturi sensed something was amiss outside her office and she stepped into the hallway.

“I went out to look at what was going on — he stood in front of me and shot me,” she said, referring to the terrorist, 23-year-old Ashraf Walid Suleiman Na’alowa, who she had never seen before.

“I escaped into my office, went under the desk, put a hand on my wound, realized I was bleeding, and all I could think was to breathe and everything will be okay,” she continued. “And then I heard four or five more loud gunshots.”

“I curled up under the desk, he came back to my office, I saw his legs, the jeans and sneakers,” Vaturi added. “After a second or two he was gone and there was silence.”

“I thought to myself that if he would have found me then that would have been it,” she said. “I would no longer be here. Luckily he was in a daze. He didn’t even look under the desk.”

Eventually, two co-workers — one Israeli and one Palestinian — entered her office and aided her until paramedics arrived.

“They were angels,” Vaturi said.

Summing up her thoughts about what she went through, Vaturi said, “I don’t feel like a hero. I was lucky.”

Vaturi also reminisced about the victims of the attack — 35-year-old Ziv Hajbi and 28-year-old Kim Levengrond Yehezkel.

“Kim, a young mother, would come every morning to the factory with a smile and show me pictures of her son and tell me how much she loved him,” Vaturi said. “Every day it was, ‘Look, new shoes,’ or ‘Here he is in the playground,’ or ‘Here he is in daycare.’ She was simply a wonderful young woman.”

“Ziv was a father of three children who I met during summer vacation when he brought them here,” Vaturi went on to say. “A wonderful young man,” she said. “He was our accountant. It is so painful.”

Looking to the future, Vaturi sounded a note of resilience.

“Of course I’ll come back to work as usual,” she said. “I don’t think that everyone is bad or everyone wants to harm us. This is the situation in our country. Will the coexistence that we had here withstand this? I think that there will be two or three weeks of asking questions, then everything will return to normal. We will all work together and everything will be fine. That is my wish. I hope that it will come true. I’m not worried.”

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