Israeli Family’s Rare Diversion Ends in Tragedy
By Doug Struck, Washington Post Foreign Service
A SECTION; Pg. A01
865 words
RISHON LETZION, Israel – Don’t go out, she said. For more than a year, Annette Termeforoosh, 35, warned her husband and children not to spend time in public places, family members recall.
Then she broke her own rule — and paid with her life.
Annette Termeforoosh was among at least 15 fatalities in a suicide bombing in this city south of Tel Aviv on Tuesday night. Until shortly before her death, she was like so many Israelis: scared, cautious, willing to give up restaurants and shopping centers to minimize risk.
The string of recent suicide bombings had unnerved her. Nearby Ashdod, where she lived, had not been a prime target for such attacks. But still, Termeforoosh did not want to go out. Each night when her husband, Daniel, came home from his job selling auto air-conditioning parts, they stayed at home with their children, family members recalled.
But “how long can you stay in your house?” said her mother-in-law, Gila Termeforoosh, 57. “At
some point, they had to have a night out.”
When Daniel arrived at home Tuesday, his wife suggested they go to a cafe that she had heard was nice. It seemed a safe enough outing, near their home, and her sister and mother would be along. Their oldest son, 11, could watch the two others, 7 and 6, for a few hours, she said.
“It was unusual” for her to suggest such an outing, Daniel said, and he gladly agreed.
They had fun at the cafe, located in a small commercial building, and as they were leaving, they heard laughter from a place upstairs, Sheffield’s, a naughtily illegal establishment with a few pool tables and unlicensed slot machines. They went in, and Annette stopped to play a machine. The suicide bomber apparently entered soon after they did.
“I heard the explosion. It was darkness. Things went flying,” said Daniel, 35, a stocky man, who today was wrapped in bandages and mending from shrapnel wounds at the Assaf Harofeh Medical Center here.
“She died on the spot,” he said, his voice flat from exhaustion and grief. “We just wanted to go out for a night.”
Annette’s mother, slightly wounded, was on another floor in the hospital today. Annette’s sister, with more serious injuries, was at another hospital. In a half-dozen hospitals around this city today, the wounded and their families nursed their injuries and their anger. In all, 57 people were hurt in the blast. At nearby cemeteries, the dead were lowered into the ground.
At the Termeforoosh home this morning, a social worker told the children their mother was dead, and that their father, grandmother and aunt all were hurt.
“The young ones don’t understand. But the older boy cried and went running to his room,” said Daniel’s cousin, Alon Mor, 35. “He asked his grandfather: When the Messiah comes, will he see his mother again?”
Soon, Annette’s mother, Hana Almassi, swept in to Daniel’s room on a tide of tears, propelled from her own hospital bed by wrenching grief.
“I want Annette, I want Annette,” she cried, wailing loudly. “What are we going to do with the
children? My whole world is collapsing. My whole world is destroyed. Enough! Enough! I’m just going crazy! I want to die.”
Daniel’s mother cradled Almassi’s head in her arms.
Down one floor outside the intensive care unit, other families could not yet begin to mourn. They kept vigil, as their loved ones lay silent, hooked to machines, bandaged from surgery, heavy-lidded from drugs, their survival still in doubt.
Here was a 27-year-old man whose spine was severed; he will be paraplegic. There were two
women with severe head injuries. Here was another woman who had lost a kidney to the bomb.
“It was amazing,” said Shaul Amir, a hospital spokesman, still shaking his head. “I held in my hand the bolt from the bomb” that severed the woman’s kidney. “It was bright and shiny.”
At nearby Tel Hashomer Hospital, relatives of Miarm Mussa paced the intensive care ward as the 47-year-old woman fought for her life. A cousin, Tamir Solomon, 32, had been near the pool hall when the explosion occurred, and rushed to the scene to try to help the victims.
“I helped one man who was desperately looking for his father. They went to celebrate a birthday, and he kept saying, ‘I can’t find my father.’ We looked in the ambulances, but we didn’t find him.”
Shaken, Solomon went home afterward to calm down. “My mother was upset. I told her just be thankful her own family was safe. Then, at 3 a.m., we got a call that her sister was one of the victims.”
In another room, Eli Ninio, 52, struggled to explain through a swollen face the scene at the little club. He was a regular, and often went to play the slots, according to his son, Shmulik Ninio, 27.
But as he was playing Tuesday night, the lights went out and he thought the slot machine had blown up, Eli told his son. It seemed to crash into his face. Only when he walked down the stairs did he realize he was covered with blood, his son said.
“You know, we have seen this every day, and after a while, you just say, ‘Okay, okay, it’s another bombing,’ ” said Shmulik Ninio. “But now it’s come to me. And I don’t really know how to react. Of course, I’m angry. But I don’t say, go kill all the Arabs. Really, I don’t know what the answer is.”