While one family has been left grieving by the cycle of violence that claimed Dalya Lemkus’s life last week, another is bewildered about why their ‘happy, normal’ son committed murder

In the home of Nahum and Brenda Lemkus in the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, there are paintings by their daughter Dalya, 26, who was stabbed to death on Monday in one of a pair of attacks on Israelis by Palestinians.

Among them is a still life in vibrant colours, signed in a bold, large hand with her first name. As his family and friends sat during shiva (the seven-day mourning period) in the garden on Wednesday, Nahum places it in a backyard overlooked from a distance by the conical hill on which the ancient palace of Herod sits. His children come carrying plates of food for those calling at his house or sit talking quietly inside.

Nahum’s daughter was murdered while hitchhiking at a bus stop near the Gush Etzion junction, run down first and then stabbed by a former Palestinian prisoner from Hebron.

Dalya had been stabbed before, eight years ago. Nahum, who emigrated to Israel from South Africa, recalls that first attack his daughter survived. “She was in the last year of school. She went out to get something for a Purim party. She wanted some material. She was on her way back from Jerusalem, close to where she was killed, when she was attacked.

“We had eight extra years of her,” Nahum says sadly. “She wrote about it. She said if we stopped what we were doing, stopped hitchhiking … then the terrorists have won. So she went back to the place where it happened …

“What was she like? She was a beautiful girl in her own way. She was very artistic. She did her national service not in the army but helping in kindergartens. She trained in what she wanted to do, then she did it – becoming an occupational therapist working with children.”

Last week’s events underlined a sense of repetition that is asserting itself amid fears that Israelis and Palestinians might be on the brink of another intifada – a third in recent memory – after a third Gaza war in five years. Here, history always repeats itself as tragedy. If there is something grimly novel about the recent violence, it is that the ubiquity of CCTV cameras means each new attack – Dalya Lemkus’s among them – has become a kind of public property. While emphasising the cold facts of the brutality meted out, it is also deeply voyeuristic. There is a context you can talk about – history and legality, occupation and settlements – but it is inevitably reductive and diminishing.

In the Lemkuses’ home on Wednesday, the day after they buried their daughter, a different kind of context imposes itself: one becoming too familiar once again in the surge of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. It is the experience of families dealing with grief and trying to extract a manageable meaning, mediated by anger, the fondness of memory and the consolation of religion.

Nahum, when the conversation touches on politics, rejects that line of questioning. “She was an occupational therapist working with children. On Sundays and Mondays she worked in Kiryat Gat; 90% of the time she got a ride with the same person.” On Monday, however, that lift was not available.

Nahum, who hitchhikes himself – “tremping” as it is called in Israel – like Dalya and other members of his family, had an arrangement: text when you leave, when you are dropped off at a stop, when you are travelling. “I heard about the incident while I was still at work. The video was on the internet before the families knew. That should never happen. Then one of the children called to say there had been no contact … I think the rest is history.”

He asks for his mobile. There are pictures of the bus stop, one of its concrete protecting bollards knocked down when 30-year-old Maher Hamdi Hashalamun drove into it in his Subaru minivan, throwing Dalya Lemkus behind the shelter. “She managed to get up again,” Nahum says. It was then that Hashalamun set upon her with a knife, before being shot and seriously wounded by a settlement security guard.

“What person gets into his car with the purpose of driving it into people in a terrorist attack? This is not normal. This is not good. These things should not happen. Not here. Not in England. Not anywhere. We need to think what it is to be a human being. I haven’t seen in the Qur’an or any other religion where it says you have to kill. People don’t go out to kill for the sake of holy sites.”

He continues: “She’ll be missed. At weddings, and when friends and family are around. When there are barmitzvahs and we are sitting around talking. I can’t put it into words.”

There is not much more meaning to be found amid the family and friends of the man who killed Dalya Lemkus and who is now in hospital under guard in a critical condition.

We find the relatives outside the apartment block where Maher lives, which is now threatened with demolition. Many of the windows have already been removed in anticipation and families’ furniture packed up.

Hamdi al-Hashlamun and his neighbours seem at a loss to explain why his son, an accountant from Bethlehem, who had served five years in prison from the age of 15 for throwing a petrol bomb at an Israeli army patrol, did what he did.

They rehearse the reasons he might have been angry, incidents that have been the signposts of a violent summer: the murder of Palestinian teenager Mohamed Abu Khdeir and friction around the al-Aqsa mosque.

“He’s a normal person,” says his father. “He’s been married for the past six years. I really don’t know why he did what he did. He’s a very religious person. He prays often. Maybe he was angry because of what has been happening at the al-Aqsa mosque. All the young people are angry, but I didn’t notice anything different.”

A neighbour says: “It seemed like Maher was happy and that he had settled down. He had got married and was doing up his apartment. He had his work and he would help on a friend’s farm. He seemed so happy. It seemed like he had got out of that atmosphere and forgotten about politics. Maybe he was still angry in his heart, like any Palestinian.”

“My heart is torn inside,” his father adds. “These things should not happen to either side.”