Jewish woman may have been aunt of Sarona terrorists
An Israeli Jew originally from Spain, who unknowningly married a family member of the Sarona terrorists, recounts her experience with Khaled and Mohammed Makhamra, who carried out the attack; she explains how the two terrorists are not the first to dress like Haredim to deceive Israelis
An Israeli women who calls herself “Yael Cohen,” who now lives in Spain, claims that she lived for a few years with Abdullah Makhamra, the uncle of the Sarona Market terrorist Khaled and Mohammed Makhamra, and gave birth to two children with him. A source from Yatta, where the two terrorists lived, confirmed yesterday that he does, indeed, remember that a family member of Khaled was indeed married to a Jewish woman.
In a Facebook post two days after the attack, “Yael” spoke about her relationship to Abdullah Makhamra and wrote that she remembers the two terrorists “as young children running around at my place, sitting in my lap and babysitting my two small children.”
“Nice to meet you, I am Rizala, Khaled's and Mahmoud’s aunt,” she says at the start of her long Facebook post. She writes that she was raised in Magala, Spain and moved to Jerusalem to study in a Haredi boarding school after her parents divorced. Before turning 16 years old, she met a Haredi boy at a convenience store, who introduced himself as “Natanel Cohen” with whom she fell in love.
Yael (she claims that’s her Israeli name) also discussed how her father came to visit once and brought her to the minimarket to meet the aforementioned boy, who asked to be set up with her. “Six weeks had passed, I found myself deeply in love with Natanel, who had been pretending to be a young Haredi man from a good home.” She wrote.
“His house was in Yatta. Natanel suddenly turned into Abdullah and his Haredi clothing became his work costume. I was still 16 years old and in the first month my first child appeared and (I thought) what should I do?”
Yael claims that she was not married to Abdullah and changed her name to Rizala. Meanwhile, she preserved her Judaism, lighting candles on Shabbat and keeping kosher. She also said her husband turned out to be a violent man: “My status was that of an abused slave,” she wrote. “The beatings and humiliations were daily. The house was my only world, cleaning, cooking, and sex slavery for a man who had become evil, disgusting, and violent. Hell on earth.”
According to Yael, she succeeded in fleeing from her husband with her two kids, returning to live with them in Spain. There, the family still lives today. “The attack at Sarona Market brought me back 14 years,” she wrote. “The Haredi suit that the two cousins wore caused me déjà vu, a type of nausea and a bad and bitter memory. That’s a way of work for the family from Yatta.”
A Palestinian source in the Makhamra family confirmed to Yedioth Ahronoth, Ynet’s sister publication, that he remembers that Abdullah Makhamra was married in the past to a Jewish woman named Rizala.
Nonetheless, he said that Abdullah is not Khaled’s and Mohammed’s uncle but rather he is related in a different way. He added that Abdullah had some issues with village leaders a number of years ago and fled to Beit Guvrin in Israel. It is possible that he left the village at the same time as Yael. Other sources in the village denied the story, but it is possible that they do not want to bring a problem of the past back to the surface.
