A friend of the woman who fought off a knife-wielding terrorist who entered her Ra’anana home on Saturday recounted how Dikla Dvir confronted the Palestinian man and shoved him out of her living-room into the clutches of police officers.

Mahmoud Faisal Bisharat, a 20-year-old Palestinian man, allegedly stabbed three Israelis outside a synagogue in the central Israeli town Saturday afternoon after being prevented from entering the Jewish house of worship. A 40-year-old man was seriously injured and two women lightly injured by the stabber. The man was later said to be in stable condition, and his condition was defined as moderate, after surgery.

Bisharat fled the scene, and a gun-wielding citizen fired a warning shot in the air as he raced through a nearby park. He then tried to enter the Dvir home, two blocks away.

Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

“He got in through the glass-paned doors and suddenly [Dikla Dvir] noticed someone inside her house, wielding a large knife. She was shocked, he raised the knife and came to stab her,” Dorit Avisar, the friend, said.

“He managed to touch her with the blade but she screamed. She said she couldn’t believe the screams coming out of her mouth, and with both hands she grabbed him, pushed him out and immediately locked the glass doors,” Avisar told the Hebrew-language website Ynet.

Avisar had visited Dvir just 20 minutes before the incident, she said. “We left home on foot and then she phoned me: ‘Watch out, don’t leave your house, a terrorist was here and stabbed me, but don’t worry, I’m fine. But let the kids know that they should come home and the police caught one but now they’re chasing another one,” Avisar recounted.

Police searched in vain for a suspected accomplice who was believed to have driven Bisharat, a resident of a village near the West Bank city of Jenin, to Ra’anana.

After Dvir shoved Bisharat out the door, she rushed to check that all entrances to the house were locked. She called the police and informed them of the incident and prevented her husband, who wanted to go outside and restrain Bisharat, from leaving the house.

“She pulled him back inside, ’You aren’t going anywhere,’ she said, and locked the door again,” her friend recalled.

“With that resourcefulness and inexplicable strength, she overpowered him and saved herself and her family,” Avisar said.

Bisharat later told investigators that he carried out the attack as revenge for the death of a relative, according to Walla news.

Ra’anana Mayor Ze’ev Bielski told residents to remain in their homes, presumably not to stage protests against the attack. “After an incident like this there’s no need for [public] gatherings,” he told Army Radio.

A video posted online which claimed to be from the scene of the arrest appeared to show Israel Police officers holding down the handcuffed suspect.

A woman can be heard saying, “Mom, he entered the house.” A man in a black t-shirt with the word “Security” on the back, carrying a sidearm, can be seen kicking the suspect in the groin while he is held down.

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=922806627800508

Former Likud minister Gideon Sa’ar responded to the incident on Twitter, noting that the stabbings in Ra’anana were allegedly carried out by a Palestinian who had illegally entered Israel.

“After three months of intifada,” Sa’ar said, referring to the uptick in terrorism and violence, “when will the all-talk government seriously take care of illegal entrants and effectively close the territories of the [Palestinian] Authority?”

The Zionist Union also criticized the government, saying the attack was “another proof of the right-wing Bibi-Bennett government’s inability to defend the citizens of Israel.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “cannot enforce” the law, it said in a statement, and Netanyahu “must go home.”

In October, a Palestinian man stabbed four people with a knife on Jerusalem Boulevard in Ra’anana, wounding one of them seriously.