It was the spring of 2002 and such Islamic terror atrocities still had the power to shock the world. Or those parts of it that were not the media which headlined the story as, “Palestinian Gunmen Kill 4 Israeli Settlers in West Bank.” And Danielle Shefi became just another “Israeli settler”.
“Anyone capable of looking a 4-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl in the face and then shooting them is not human,” Jacob Shefi told the press. “Danielle, who never hurt anyone and who was taught to love and respect all human beings, Jew or Arab, was murdered in her parents’ bedroom – which for her should have been the safest place.”
When her kindergarten classmates were told that the little girl had gone to heaven, they asked, “What is Danielle doing up there near the birds and planes?”
“Please remember Danielle Shefi, a little girl in Israel. Danielle was five. When the murderers came, she hid under her bed. Palestinian gunmen found and killed her anyway,” Elie Wiesel, the great writer of the Holocaust, urged President Bush. “Please remember that while Israelis mourned alongside us for our nation’s tragedy on September 11th, Yasir Arafat was busy suppressing footage of his constituents dancing in the streets.”
But few remembered and the world moved on. One of the terrorists from the Adora attack was released as part of the disastrous Shalit hostage exchange deal in 2011.
Fadi Mohammed Salaam Dewik, that terrorist, rose through the ranks and became a senior figure in Hamas. After Israel had finished its previous raid on the Al-Shifa hospital, the Qatari base used by Hamas, Dewik along with many other terrorists returned to the hospital.
They assumed that Israel would not come back without offering plenty of warning the way that it had during the previous raid on Al-Shifa under pressure from the Biden administration.
But this time the terrorists had made a fatal mistake.
After a campaign by Islamic terrorist supporters in Dearborn, Michigan, and their leftist allies, the Biden administration had turned on Israel to salvage his chances in the swing state.
Senator Schumer was chosen by the administration to denounce Israel and warn it not to endanger civilians by attacking Hamas. The weekend after Schumer’s shameful speech, Israel came back to Al-Shifa and this time there were no more warnings to tip off the terrorists.
Over the holiday of Purim, Israeli soldiers took out over 200 terrorists and captured over 650 terrorists. There were more terrorists at the hospital than its official number of 700 patient beds.
The terrorists included the top leadership of Islamic Jihad and senior Hamas officials. While most of the terrorists surrendered, expecting to be traded in a deal for the hostages, some of the most hardened holed up in the hospital’s maternity ward and wouldn’t come out.
Among them was Dewik.
Cartoons had often depicted Hamas hiding behind babies, and the terrorists made those cartoons come to life as they opened fire from the ER, threw grenades from the burn ward and when the maternity ward was finally liberated, IDF soldiers found sniper rifles, handguns and mortars hidden everywhere from beds to drop ceilings.
Dewik died alongside Zakariya Najeeb, a top terrorist who had coordinated operations for Hamas, in the maternity ward where mothers are supposed to bring life into the world.
The terrorist who had taken part in the murder of a 5-year-old girl died in a place of children.
Justice had been delayed for 22 years before finally catching up with Fadi Mohammed Dewik.
“When I heard my daughter was murdered, my first reaction was: there is no God,” Jacob Shefi said at the time. “Then I came to my senses. I thought to myself, here, my two sons and my wife were left alive, even though terrorists shot at them from point blank range. They also shot at me and didn’t hit me, there is a Higher Power watching over us.”
“She loved to pray, go to synagogue. If only she had gone out with me in the morning, maybe she would be alive,” he said.
Today, Jacob is one of the “Blue Riders” motorcyclists in Israeli law enforcement and posts inspirational religious messages in the wake of the Islamic terrorist attacks of Oct 7.
When Danielle was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she said that she wanted to be a righteous woman. Today she would have been a young woman, perhaps married with children of her own. Islamic terrorists denied her the opportunity as they had so many innocent victims, from the dead in Adora to those murdered on 9/11, 7/7 in London and Oct 7 in Israel.
Justice under these conditions seems elusive and at times even impossible. And those who are left behind may even wonder if there is a God who sees and makes right a broken world.
Danielle’s full name was Danielle Bat-El Shefi. Bat-El means “Daughter of G-d”.
Murdered on a Sabbath, Danielle was avenged on Purim which commemorates the day when Haman had plotted to kill the Jews, “from the young to the old, little children and women”.
The Biden administration and the world had abandoned Israel, but that Higher Power had not.
