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Terror victim: ‘It’s a miracle my baby and I are alive’

Adi Zohar, shot and seriously wounded by terrorists at the Ma’ale Adumim checkpoint, recounts her harrowing experience.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

One of the two seriously wounded victims of Thursday’s terrorist shooting attack at the Ma’ale Adumim checkpoint said it was a “miracle” that she and her unborn child are alive and well when recounting her harrowing experience Sunday.

After recovering somewhat from the emergency surgery to remove shrapnel from her chest, Adi Zohar (30), who is five months pregnant, told the Hebrew media of the harrowing moments of the attack.

“This is the road I travel through on a daily basis,” she said, “it’s the only way to my job. I was waiting in traffic, a normal morning. I was talking on the phone to my aunt … and I noticed that the car in front of me, with a Palestinian license plate, suddenly crashed into the car in front of it.”

“It was a very strange accident,” she commented, because “all the lanes were full” and there was nowhere for anyone to pass anyone else.

Then the situation turned dangerous.

“In seconds, the terrorist got out of the car like a nut and I immediately saw his gun,” Zohar continued. “I started to scream into the phone that he was going to shoot me because I understood that there was no real way for me to get away.”

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She said she immediately thought of her unborn baby and tried sliding down in her seat “so that he would hit the least vital part of me.”

“I said [the Jewish prayer] ‘Shema Yisrael’. I guess I didn’t feel the bullet because of the stress, but saw that my whole shirt was getting full of blood. I decided to get out of the car and try to escape.”

Zohar said that because they were afraid, several people wouldn’t open their car doors to her as she crawled away, until one “wonderful woman” did.

“I told her with as much calmness as I could muster, ‘I’m pregnant, they shot me, there was a terror attack, call an ambulance.’”

She only understood later exactly how much danger she had been in, she noted, because she saw in video clips that the terrorist had circled around and come near her again.

“God decided that he wouldn’t finish what he’d begun,” she said with a smile.

Thanking the hospital staff, her family and “so many people” whom she doesn’t even know for their support, she said, “I feel that a huge miracle happened to me and I want to focus only on that. I feel that I got my life back.”

“The piece of shrapnel lodged in a very dangerous place,” she explained, “but I and my baby are alive…. I really thought in those minutes that these are my last moments of life, and I thought of my son [at home] who is only two years old and will have to go on without me, and thank God, this is the miracle, that his mother came back to life.”