Sometime around 10:30 on a Friday evening on March 11, 2011, terrorists entered the house in the Israeli community of Itamar. It was the house of the Fogel family. They entered through the living room picture window but did not notice 6-year-old child Roi sleeping on the couch. They went right into the bedroom, where they slashed the throats of Udi Fogel and baby Hadas, who were asleep.

Wife and mother Ruth came out of the bathroom and was stabbed on its threshold. The evidence shows that she tried to fight the terrorists. The terrorists then slashed the throat of the 11-year-old Yoav who was reading in bed, missed 2-year old Yishai who was asleep but totally covered by his comforter, and brutally murdered 3-year old Elad with two stabs to his heart. With that, they locked the door and escaped.

The Fogel’s 12-year-old daughter Tamar returned home from spending Shabbos dinner with friends at about 12:30AM and found the door locked. She asked a neighbor, Rabbi Yaakov Cohen, of the Itamar Yeshiva, to help her. He brought a weapon with him once he noticed tracks and mud near the house. The two woke up the 6-year old sleeping in the living room by calling through the window, and when he opened the door, the Rabbi returned to his home. When she entered the bedrooms, the young daughter saw the horrific blood-soaked scene and ran out of the house screaming.

This wasn’t just a terrorist attack; it was the butchering of a young family, including little children. By any measure of humanity, this attack was simply disgusting.

Immediately after the massacre of the young family, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas telephoned Prime Minister Netanyahu to condemn the attack. In an interview with Israel Radio, he called it a despicable, immoral, and inhuman act, saying, “A human being is not capable of something like that.” “Scenes like these – the murder of infants and children and a woman slaughtered – cause any person endowed with humanity to hurt and to cry.