, shattering 30 bones, carving 18 machete wounds into her flesh, and slaughtering her friend
right in front of her, Hartuv wakes up to learn her attacker's back on the street. Not from some official phone call from the Israeli government, mind you. No, she had to break the news herself to Luken's grieving family.
That's how Israel treats its survivors these days: with a shrug and a media leak. This all went down as part of the hostage swap that finally cracked open the gates for 20 living captives and whatever remains of the 28 still held by Hamas. In return, about 2,000 Palestinian prisoners cut loose, including
Iyad Hassan Hussein Fatafta, the monster who helped turn Hartuv and Luken into bloody statistics. Families of victims are howling about the government's radio silence, finding out via TV instead of a courtesy call. It's like being stabbed all over again, but with bureaucracy instead of a blade.
Hartuv, a Britisher who's made Israel her home, got the word from a journalist. She still doesn't know where Fatafta was dumped, maybe among the 154 shipped off to Egypt, if you buy the unconfirmed chatter from
Al-Araby Al-Jadeed. All she knows is the knot in her gut: the fear that one day, their paths might cross again. "I didn't think he'd get released, because he was complicit in the murder of an American citizen," Hartuv told
The Jerusalem Post. "When [US President Donald] Trump was elected, I was pretty sure that no one with American blood on their hands would get out. So that was a great shock for me, and it was very enraging."
Let's rewind to that nightmare in the forest near
Beit Shemesh, because Hartuv's recounting it now isn't just therapy, it's a stark reminder of what these animals do when the world's not watching. She and Luken, an American Christian tourist just soaking in the Holy Land, were hiking when three Palestinians sidled up asking for water. In Israel's brutal heat, that shouldn't raise alarms, but Hartuv's instincts screamed trouble. She palmed her penknife, braced for a mugging, and nudged Luken back toward the trail.
Too late. The trio pounced like wolves, slamming them to the dirt, Hartuv's nose crunching under a boot. Bound and gagged, she fought dirty, slicing one low enough to draw blood: "nicking him in the balls," as she puts it. That DNA trail nailed the creeps later.
Hartuv tried everything--offering her "Mercedes," faking tourist status (busted by her ID), even coaching Luken to flop into a seizure. The terrorists just jammed a knife to her throat: Stop shaking, or else.
What flashes through your head when death's knocking? Hartuv breaks it down in stages: freeze, fight, then that eerie surrender when the end feels scripted. "The biggest moment [of fear] was when they forced us to our knees. And that's the moment I understood he was going to behead me," she said. "In that moment, I'm thinking about how he's going to do it. Is he going to chop off my head? Is he going to saw it off? And my only prayer then really was, just make it quick. But at that moment, the moment of death, it's like you're emptied. You're emptied of everything that makes you who you are."
"Too scared to be frightened," she endured the "Allahu akbar" chants and the stabs, her mind split between the ridiculous injustice of dying by murder and the heartbreak for her family: "I never thought I was going to be murdered... And the other thing I was thinking about was the people I loved. I was worried for them. How are they going to feel? What about when they get the news? That’s all I could think of."
The assault clocked in under an hour, but the aftermath? A lifetime. Bleeding out with a collapsed lung, sliced diaphragm, crushed sternum, and ribs like shattered glass, Hartuv didn't crawl for survival. She'd made peace with the grave. No, she dragged herself a mile, barefoot, bound, gagged, for one reason: so cops could find her body fast and hunt the killers before they struck again. "And each time I tried [to get up], I fell, and I just wanted to sleep. And what is sleep? It’s death," she said. "Nothing actually hurts anymore at this point. I just felt very warm, very resolved to my fate, but also determined to just die nearer, so they can be caught quicker." A pro pianist, she tuned out the pain by mentally fingering the keys to "
Somewhere Over the Rainbow", chords from Jewish songwriters on the brink of the Holocaust. "It was written by Jews just before the Second World War," she said... "And I'm really walking this path of death, saying to myself, C minor seven, G flat; I mean, these are all chords. And that's how I managed to walk over a mile."
She staggered into a family picnic, veering left to shield the kids from her gore: "I thought I better just veer off to the left where the children are, away from the kids, because if the kids see me, they're going to be traumatized for life... I did that at risk in that the adults won't see me, in order that also the children won't see me. But I need the adults to see me. So it was these choiceless choices in that moment, and then as I'm approaching the picnic table, they still don't look up, and the sun is getting lower, and my shadow crept across their picnic table, and this woman looks up and she screams, and I collapse right there on the ground."
Even then, sprawled in the dirt amid chopper blades and ambulance sirens, Hartuv wasn't begging for life. "I wanted to be with my Maker, make my peace," she admitted. An Arab surgeon patched her up, but the scars run soul-deep.
Fast-forward to court, and the terrorists admitted that they'd murdered another woman months earlier, and slit Luken's throat because they pegged her for a Jew. Hartuv emerged from that forest more Jewish than ever. "I went for a walk. I went for that walk in the forest. I was Jewish, and I walked out of that forest a Jew," she reflected. "There’s a big difference. And after the attack, I thought, I love my people, I love my history, I love my culture, I love my Judaism. I'm so proud to be Jewish....
"And then there was this little parenthesis, and I always thought: What if they are released in a deal? It would feel like unrequited love. You know, when you love a country so much, it’s like when you love a guy so much and he’s beautiful and he just doesn't quite love you in the same way, right? And that's what I felt that it would be like.
"I don't think we should ever negotiate with terrorists, ever. And we are going to see these terrorists murder again, because they say so."
That's the raw truth Hartuv's wrestling with now, cheering the hostage reunions while seething at the cost. "I can be happy for [the hostages and their families] and I can be raging for myself," she explained... "Right now, that is the dialogue, the discourse in Israeli society we have. We've paid a price for this. We're celebrating, and we should, but we know that, down the road, these terrorists are going to murder again.... One situation doesn't resolve the other. The joy doesn't resolve the rage or mollify anything. But as a society, we have to hold these things in unison, the unfairness of it all, and the compassion that we should extend to the hostages, and if we don’t hold it intentionally, it’s going to break."
And here's where it gets infuriating: Hartuv correctly lays the blame square on the West's "moral abandonment of Israel," starting
October 8, 2023. "From October 8, there’s been a moral abandonment of Israel [which] started in Western civilization," she said. "It's one thing to say ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists,' all good and fair, but I feel that Israel has been pushed into a corner over two years...."
Western "allies" let intifada chants echo in streets, celebrated the bloodiest day for Jews since the ovens, then handcuffed Israel's response with deadlines Ukraine never faced. "We know there's terrible pressure to do things in the nick of time, and people were already warning us about putting boots on the ground before we even went in [Gaza]. So we have mixed messages from governments that claim they support Israel, but they tie our hands behind our backs."
She gives Netanyahu a pass; he was boxed in, but says he should've rallied Europe for a Gaza squeeze: no food, no water till the hostages walked. Instead, global busybodies chipped away at Israel's leverage, leaving Hamas fat and defiant. The result? A deal no sane democracy would touch, all because of "the cowardly, cowardly, cowardice of the West, the media, and the governments." Not Bibi, not even Trump, just the spineless chorus forcing Israel to cough up murderers.
Hartuv torches the media's word games, too, slapping "murder" on Gaza collateral while ignoring Hebrew's kill-vs.-murder split. "They've charged us with the violation of one of the commandments with all these deaths in Gaza. What's that commandment? Thou shalt not murder... and we have been very lazy and we haven't caught on to that. We should have been saying that, in Hebrew, there are two different words [for kill and murder]. This is a war. This is not a genocide. People die. There is killing, and there's nothing morally wrong with that in a war situation."
It's all tied to
Israel's hasbara flop, Hartuv argues, preaching moral high ground while Palestinian society cheers the carnage. "Because we already are cornered from October 7.... We always have to come up saying we're going to keep that moral code of behavior, all well and good, but unrealistic with the realities of Palestinian society."
She nails the big lie: the war's not just Hamas. GoPro footage,
Bibas family handover mobs, tunnel networks under kitchens, it's a whole rotten ecosystem. "You can see it from the terrorist GoPro footage.... You saw it at that obscene, grotesque release of the Bibas family. All these terrorists had different headbands, and every color headband is a different faction or terrorist group. So you have the PFLP, Islamic Jihad, [and] Fatah. The war isn't just against Hamas."
Civilians were rapists in plain clothes, looters, body-snatchers, and enablers turning blind eyes. "Apart from the terrorist groups, there were people in civilian clothes who raped and pillaged and burned. Then you had thousands more waiting in Gaza to take the dead and the alive [hostages]. And then, at the release ceremony, you had thousands more in civilian clothes. And if you look at the extent of the tunnels, all these innocent civilians, you want to tell me that somebody just cooking a little bit of laffa bread didn’t know that somebody was digging a tunnel under the kitchen? They've turned a blind eye. And every hostage who's come back says there are no innocent civilians in Gaza.'"
Israel dodged this truth, virtue-signaling to a world that hates Jews anyway. "Israel failed to address the Palestinian civilian involvement in the preparation of, during, and in the aftermath of, the massacre... Regardless of how the country virtual signals, she said that 'it's time to learn, though, that no matter what we do as Jews, people are not going to like us.'"
This ceasefire turns out to be a breather, not victory. Hartuv's plea: Time for real talk on hasbara, ditch the delusions, own the truth, guard that moral core. Because if Israel doesn't, the next forest walk could end the same way.
Hartuv's no victim frozen in time.
Yad Vashem educator, bird geek, pianist, wordsmith, she has channeled the hell into her memoir,
The Rage Less Traveled, and now aids
October 7 survivors in logging their horrors for history. With Trump's 20-point Gaza blueprint kicking in, she's hit the global stage: Piers Morgan, Tommy Robinson chats, subtitle translations to blast the facts wide.
In a world that would rather hug terrorists than hear survivors, Tal Hartuv's voice cuts like that penknife she wielded. Listen carefully, before the next "joy" deal unleashes more rage.
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