A terror victim this week toured her native Britain to talk about how she watched Palestinian extremists “hack” her friend to death.
Kay Wilson was not just an observer of a horrific 2010 attack in an Israeli forest — she was stabbed 13 times and left for dead.
Ms Wilson moved from the UK to Israel in 1986, and until this week had not returned since two Palestinians — both of them since jailed — tied, gagged and stabbed her and her friend.
She remembers watching the men murdering Kristine Luken, an American Christian, with a knife. Ms Wilson, who is Jewish, was on the ground, reciting the Shema prayer. “I watched this man’s hand clutching his knife and he plunges it into my chest and it misses by heart by four millimetres,” she recalls.
“I have 13 knife wounds. The knife was 25 cm long — enormous and serrated.” She believes that she only survived by playing dead until the attackers left.
The knife perforated her lung and diaphragm, and it is only now that she is well enough to travel overseas.
After the attack, she believed that her death was certain. Ms Luken had around five minutes to live, but she could not comfort her because she was bound and gagged. So she set herself a target for what she believed were her last moments on earth — to get back to the main path in the forest. “I had one goal, which was to get back to the path so someone would find my body.”
She surprised herself by managing to walk more than half a mile, and eventually a family out for a picnic found her and sought help.
That day was not the last time she saw her attackers and friend’s murderers — she faced them in court. “The courtroom was a small room and I was sweating and felt fear,” she recalls.
Ms Wilson, a 49-year-old tour guide and writer, wonders about the possibility that they could be released in the context of peace talks and thinks that it will “exacerbate” her pain.
Asked what her main message for her UK tour, which took place in various locations over the past week, she says: “To choose life and live in the moment, and embrace the miracle of life.”
