At around 10.30 pm last Friday, two men slipped into the home of Udi and Ruth Fogel and their six children, aged between 12 years and 3 months. In one of the bedrooms they found the 36-year-old Udi asleep with his 3-month-old daughter, Hadas. The two men slit their throats. Perhaps hearing a noise, Ruth Fogel, 35, walked out of the bathroom and was then stabbed to death after a brief struggle. The two men entered another bedroom, where they found 11-year-old Yoav reading in bed. They slit his throat. His 3-year-old brother, Elad, was also in the room, and he was stabbed twice in the chest. At around 11 o’clock, the two men departed. Fortunately, they had not found two other children, Roi, 6, and Yishai, 2, who had stayed asleep while the five murders took place.
At midnight, the 12-year-old daughter, Tamar, returned to the house and found that it was locked. She summoned help, and after managing to wake Roi and getting him to unlock the door, she entered her parents’ bedroom and saw her brother Yishai trying to shake Udi and Ruth awake. When the paramedics arrived, they found that Elad was still alive, but they were unable to save him. The sight in the house was, according to a local rabbi, ’shocking’, a word that can never encapsulate the horror of such a situation. Only photographs can, and I link to them here with a very sincere warning that they are extremely graphic.
Why do so few of us here know about this massacre? You would have to be a pretty conscientious reader of the foreign pages or the Israeli press to have heard about it, and much of the world’s media is understandably focussed on Japan and Libya, where far more deaths have taken – and are taking – place. But I suspect that even without the tsunami and Gaddafi, these killings would have received little or no more attention than they actually did.
You’ll notice that I’m not telling you precisely where these murders took place, or indeed who is suspected. I’ll leave you to find that out for yourselves, and to draw your own conclusions as to why the world has largely ignored this story. Today, five members of one family lie buried. There is no good reason why the story of their deaths should be similarly entombed.
