Israeli woman fends off Itamar style attack

A resident of an Israeli moshav on the Egyptian border had the presence of mind to save her children and fend off a terrorist attack in her home this past Tuesday.

A Gaza terrorist evaded detection crossing the border into Israel and may have entered through a breach in the fence left from last Friday’s Palestinian Arab riot near Khan Younis.

The intended victim, Yael Ram-Matzpun, 39, was asleep near two of her four children when the kaffiyah-clad terrorist entered her room wielding a knife and a crowbar. His heavy footsteps entering the house--the door was unlocked--woke her and he turned on the bedroom light and told her to get up. She asked him what he wanted, she refused his order to lie down and he leaned against her, slashing her face and neck. She pushed him aside, a scuffle ensued, and she reached for and began ringing a large old fashioned school bell to make noise, to scare the attacker and alert neighbors. She told one child to run to a sibling in an adjoining room and managed to push the youngest child into a nearby safe room. The attacker ran into the shower room and she wedged a bed against the door and alerted the army. The attacker squeezed out the bathroom window and was apprehended by the IDF. When he attacked them they shot and killed him.

The circumstances of the breach and attack are being investigated.

It was noted that Yael, a resident of Sde Avraham, was trained in Krav Maga, Israeli self-defense. She said that her first thought upon seeing the intruder was that he was a terrorist not a burglar and that she didn’t want an Itamar situation, recalling the murders of the Fogel family in that town last year.

Local self-defense instructor, Sensei John Capobianco, owner of the Nijiuroku Jiu Jitsu School of Self Defense in Hewlett, analyzed the mother’s behavior. “Self defense training is supposed to give you training to withstand an attack to your system,” he explained. “Training in knife defense lets you know that you are going to get cut and not freeze up. The conditioning is a stressful enough experience to enable you to continue if cut. It also teaches you to take advantage of anything you can use around you as a weapon, distraction or to call attention to an attacker—like a bell. She did all the right things; she kept the attacker off balance. Putting the child in the safe room was really good, but you don’t leave the (house) door unlocked; she was feeling in her safe zone. We really don’t have a safe zone anymore.”

The School of Self Defense is located inside the 5 Towns Fencers’ Club at 15 Prospect Avenue.