Pregnant woman and baby dead in Israel after public stabbing

A pregnant woman in Israel was stabbed to death, allegedly by her father and brother, with doctors unable to save either mother or baby in the tragic case.

Aya Abu Hajjaj was just 24 and in an “advanced state” of pregnancy, likely her third trimester, when she was murdered while walking her children to school. Video of the attack showed her being followed by an assailant, who jumped on her from behind and stabbed her over 20 times. Her terrified children ran away and seem to have been unharmed during the attack. After stabbing her, the assailant jumped into a waiting car and sped off, leaving her bleeding in the street. Footage of the horrific attack has circulated on social media; in it, you can see her attacker seemingly targeting her torso.

Within hours, the two family members were arrested.

“When we arrived at the scene, there was a lot of commotion around the injured woman,” medics told Haaretz. “She was lying unconscious and suffered from penetrating wounds. We put her in an intensive care vehicle and evacuated her quickly while continuing to perform CPR. Her condition was critical.”

She was then rushed to a hospital, where doctors desperately worked to try to save both her life and that of her preborn child’s, including performing an emergency c-section, but it was too late. Both were declared dead.

Hagit Pe’er, chairwoman of Na’amat, an Israeli women’s rights group, condemned the attack as “domestic terrorism” and “a double murder of the woman and the fetus.” In a statement to the Times of Israel, she said, “We all hope that the Israel Police will soon find this inhuman terrorist and that Israel will serve him justice, as should be done with terrorists.”

Women are at high risk of experiencing violence during pregnancy. Homicide is known to be a leading cause of death for pregnant women, with pregnant women more likely to die from murder than they are to die from the three leading obstetric causes of death (high blood pressure disorders, hemorrhage, and sepsis). In the United States alone, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, over 300,000 pregnant women experience domestic abuse every year.