It was all so sudden.
One minute, Yishai Cohen was driving in Israel’s Binyamin region with his wife and baby on a sunny Monday morning. The next minute, a Palestinian was shooting at his car.
“The terrorist stopped the car and went in our direction while shooting. I wanted to get out of the car to eliminate him, but my wife told me she was hurt,” Cohen recalled.
“I feared for her and the baby’s safety and shot back from a distance; the terrorist got in a car and drove away,” he said.
Mevasseret Cohen, 27, was taken to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center with moderate injuries from at least two bullet wounds in her shoulder. She is currently in stable condition. Sitting in the car’s back seat next to Eden, she had shielded their six-week-old son, Eden Yosef, with her body. The infant was unharmed.
“My baby’s stroller is full of holes from the bullets, thank God nothing happened to him. My wife Mevasseret, the lioness, she stopped the bullets with her own body,” said Cohen.
By firing back from the driver’s seat, Cohen, an army reservist who was on leave from Gaza, is credited with saving lives. It isn’t clear if Cohen actually hit the terrorist, but the Palestinian fled the scene. A search is ongoing for the shooter.
“There is no doubt, and the police also believe that, thanks to my son-in-law’s shooting the terrorist couldn’t shoot them to death,” Mevasseret’s mother, Tamar told TPS.
The incident took place two weeks after the Israel Defense Forces confiscated weapons from several Binyamin-area farms.
But Cohen notes that Israel is at war and civilian security patrols are being expanded across the country because of terror attacks like the one he foiled.
“I have to go back to battles in Gaza tomorrow and leave my wounded wife at home in a community that has already suffered a lot of losses from terror,” Cohen said. “Without the weapons we will have no way to defend our home.”
