Israeli injured in Barcelona recounts attack
'If my husband was not there, they would have trampled me. So many people fell on me that I could not even get up,' recounts Edna Hajaj, who was injured fleeing from the scene of the Barcelona attack.
Edna Hajaj, a resident of Be'er Sheva in her 50s, planned to go with her husband to eat in the center of Barcelona in the last hours of their vacation, when they found themselves facing Thursday's attack, in which 14 people were killed and roughly 130 were injured.
"We arrived in Barcelona on Sunday, and yesterday was supposed to be our last day there. Before we went out to eat, we decided to go to the market located next to a kosher restaurant," recalls Hajaj. "Just as we entered, in a matter of a minute or two, we heard a squeak and things being dragged. It took us one second to understand this was an attack.
"We did not know where it came from, we did not know where to run and what to do. During my escape I fell and a lot of people fell on me, a lot, and they simply trampled me. By the time my husband dragged me back I had already been hit in the ribs, my toes were broken. People shouted and fell on each other, it was terrible. "
Hajaj did not even have time to take her belongings from the hotel because the entrance was blocked, so she traveled from the scene of the attack to the airport and from there she flew to Israel and landed at 6 am on Friday. She was treated at Soroka Medical Center on Friday and was later released.
"If my husband was not there, they would have trampled me. So many people fell on me that I could not even get up," she said. "We're glad it ended this way and no worse."
In what the Foreign Ministry is calling a "statistical miracle," no Israelis were listed among the attack's victims.
