13-year-old Liam Yutko, who was wounded in a stabbing attack in Kiryat Gat on Saturday night. Photo: Screenshot.

“I knew that when you’re bleeding, you have to put cloth on the wound,” Liam Yutko told Israeli news site Walla on Sunday, from her hospital bed at the Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon. Yutko, 13, was among five victims of a stabbing attack in Kiryat Gat on Saturday night.

“So I took my scarf, and put it where I saw blood on myself,” said Yutko, who is being treated for knife wounds to her chest and abdomen in the attack, perpetrated by a Palestinian it took security forces five full hours to apprehend. “And then I immediately phoned the police and my mother.”

Yutko continued: “I was walking with a friend and saw somebody suspicious,” she recounted. “So we started walking fast, and then he began chasing us. I tried to run, and then he stabbed me in the back. And then he turned around and stabbed me in the stomach and the leg. My friend who was with me saw that I had fallen, and I told him to keep running, because the terrorist continued to chase  him, but stopped at some point. I sat on the ground, to keep the blood from gushing. Somebody gave me a phone because mine was dead. I called my mother and said, ‘I’ve been stabbed; I’ve been stabbed,’ and then I gave him back his phone. I didn’t cry; I wasn’t tense; I just sat there and waited for the ambulance.”

Yutko added that when she first saw the terrorist, she suspected him right away. “I had a feeling that something was going to happen,” she said. “I saw all the terrorist attacks on the news, and now I am part of that and it’s strange. I never expected it would happen to me.”

Yutko’s chilling encounter was with an 18-year-old Palestinian, who fled the scene, causing police to caution all residents of the area to remain in their homes until further notice. He was later identified as Muhammad Shaker al-Tarda from the village of Yatta near Hebron.

Al-Tarda was apprehended when two of his friends turned him in to authorities. He was caught in the yard of a house near the area of his stabbing spree, which inflicted moderate wounds to Yutko, three middle-aged Israelis and a Bedouin, who was lightly injured when — mistaken for the terrorist – he was beaten and tied up.