A well-known Israeli TV personality has spoken about the harrowing message she received from her younger sister just moments before she was shot dead by a Hamas gunman at a music festival near the Gaza Strip on Saturday.
News anchor Ma’ayan Adam, 36, said her sister Mapal, 27, was one of the more than 260 partygoers to lose their life at the Super Nova dance festival.
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“Don’t tell mum, but there has been an infiltration of dozens of terrorists,” Mapal texted to her sister shortly before being gunned down, her grieving sister revealed in a heartbreaking interview with Israeli TV channel N12.
Her sister’s texts continued: “There are wounded here, blood everywhere. I’m scared, Ma’ayan.”
“I don’t know where to run to,” she added.
“They’re killing everybody.”
In total, the two sisters were texting for 20 minutes and no Israeli military personnel had arrived on the scene during that time.
“I responded to her: ‘Who’s shooting? We’re shooting?’,” Ma’ayan told N12.
“Because I could not believe that 20 minutes had gone by since she first started texting me and this was the situation.
“That’s when she replied to me: ‘The terrorists’.”
Ma’ayan, who has also appeared on the Israeli version of Dancing with the Stars, asked her little sister to text her a picture of where she was.
She then tried to call her – but couldn’t get through.
The TV personality said Mapal and her boyfriend Roey had hidden under a truck and “played dead” after receiving shrapnel wounds from a nearby exploding grenade.
Tragically, Mapal would not get out of the terrifying situation alive, but her boyfriend survived.
Taking to Instagram, Ma’ayan paid tribute to her sister in a heartbreaking post, sharing the last photo her sister sent her before she died.
It is a view from under the truck where Mapal and her boyfriend were hiding.
“On Saturday afternoon, in this idyllic setting, Mapal, our baby, hid underneath a truck and pretended as if she were dead,” she wrote.
“She held out for hours and didn’t move until terrorists killed her execution style.”
She went on to say that Roey, who had only moved in with her the week before, was trying to shield her.
“He was lying next to her, suffered gunshot wounds in the back, and survived to tell us how she died in his arms,” she wrote.
She said the family was “crushed to pieces” by Mapan’s death and suffering “pain that I didn’t know existed”.
Speaking to N12, Ma’ayan said her sister’s boyfriend had told her she had been “calm throughout”.
“I’m not sure he’s telling me the truth,” she said.
“I’m sure she was terribly frightened.”
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