“Beats me with the rolling pin like in baseball.” The chilling hours spent by Shira Iscove

After two days in the intensive care unit Iscove regained consciousness. In room number 5 in the hospital ward at Soroka Hospital she lay wrapped in bandages, with fresh scars, a broken hand and sore ribs, and recounted the evening she was nearly murdered – the pleas for her life, the beatings of the rolling pin, the stabbings and the cries for help. Everything she remembered until the moment she lost consciousness in the arms of her neighbor who saved her life.

The descriptions given before you are probably difficult to read and sometimes very graphic. But Iscov’s case – which survived to dictate this protocol – paints a chronicle of the development of a violent relationship, including the early signs, in such a way that many women will no longer be able to sketch, and perhaps save the next victim.

Until a few years ago, Shira Isakov and Aviad Moshe lived in the same block in Tel Aviv. They used to do jogging with a group of neighbors and during one of the runs she shared it with her that she broke up with her partner. Moshe began to woo her. “During one of the conversations, I told him that I had finally said goodbye to the ex, and a week later he offered me to surf at Sap at sea,” she told the researcher. “From there I didn’t quite understand what was going on. I still had feelings for my ex and I didn’t understand how it was going. After a month and a half we became a couple. We got engaged very quickly.”

The two’s relationship progressed rapidly. In December 2018, Moshe proposed to her and in March they were already married. In April she became pregnant and in late November gave birth to their eldest son. “This is it. It was our time in Tel Aviv. We became parents very quickly,” she concluded.

Shortly afterwards, Moshe received a job offer at the Ramon camp military base. Shira resigned from her job to move to Mitzpe Ramon with him in the background of their difficult financial situation. “He asked me to join him on this journey. I said come on let’s go for it. I’m with you.”

She found a job as a customer relations manager at McCann Valley and the two began their lives in Mitzpe Ramon: “There was a good transition. The adaptation was difficult because of the distance from home, friends and family. But we had the peace that was not in Tel Aviv.

But the move to Mitzpe Ramon did not allow the couple a clean start. Isakov still had precipitation towards Moshe following a previous violent incident between them, even when they lived in Tel Aviv, but they preferred to close that attack “within the family” and try to forget and move on. Despite this, she said in her testimony: “After what happened in Tel Aviv, I did not want any more children from him.”

According to her, the Corona period improved their relationship and as a result she changed her mind and decided to get pregnant, but two weeks before the attack on the eve of the holiday she underwent a miscarriage. According to her, even though she was shrinking from excruciating pain on the floor, Moshe was indifferent to her suffering. “I said, ‘Well, we’ll take paracetamol and suffer another day,'” she said in her testimony, but later the pain worsened and she went to the emergency room, where she was told that the fetus had no pulse. “I started crying,” she repeated. Moshe in his interrogation denied the things.

According to her, since the abortion, their relationship has deteriorated. “I’m always angry with him,” she said. She in turn accused him of abortion and during the argument on the eve of the holiday called him a “killer”.

Shira’s testimony was repeatedly interrupted due to intensive medical treatment she underwent in those days and interrupted the investigations. Several times she asked to stop the interrogations because of an emotional difficulty in listening to the recording of the assault and screams from that night.

The recording, the most significant sight in the case, was obtained by police investigators from Moshe’s cell phone. According to Iscove, he was compulsive and used to obsessively record arguments they had. “I do not know if it is funny or not that he recorded himself at the time of the murder, that he shot himself,” she told the investigator. “It explains to me why he did not speak. I do not know what he was thinking but he did not speak. He knew there was a recording.”

As the investigation progressed, while on the hospital bed, Iscove began to recreate her assault: how she suffocated, how she spat her teeth, how she felt her consciousness blurry and how she mustered the strength to shout at neighbors.

The first quarrel that day started because of a bottle of wine. She sent Moshe to buy a bottle she liked, but he bought the wrong kind. “He started taking me down,” she told the investigator. “He told me ‘nothing is good for you. Go to hell. Go buy the wine you want.’ I said to him, why this talk? It’s wine for us.”

She tried to repress and as usual turned to cooking, but soon a new argument arose, this time on a different subject, and the confrontation became physical. “Started cuddling,” she said. When their son woke up she took him to the bathroom and called her father to tell him she was coming home. Here, apparently, the fate of the evening is decided.

“He started beating me right away,” Iscov said in her testimony. “He picked me up, threw me down the hall, and I tell him (to Dad, AK) ‘Here he started beating, he got back to it.’ For a whole year he did not do it and here he is back to it again. Then he tried to reassure my parents. ”

Iscove tried to keep showering their son, and during this time Moshe documented himself cursing her. “I slapped him and said ‘you are cheeky, how do you hit me?'” She said. At this point, police informed her that she was being investigated under a warning for merely assaulting a spouse.

Iscove packed a bag and wanted to go to her parents, but Moshe blocked the door for her. “And in the process, he closes the windows and the shutter next to the door,” she told the investigator. “I told him, ‘Let me go.'”

At this point, she said, he changed his attitude and tried to appease her. “He told me ‘Mami, come on, calm down,'” but Iscove insisted, saying, “I told him he raised his hand and it’s over. There are no police. There is nothing. We will end nicely with a divorce and that’s it.”

For Moses it was enough. The physical confrontation escalated. “Then with the rolling pin he gave me a blow to the head. I fell straight to the floor and he hit me again and again and all blood, a puddle of blood,” she said. In another testimony she added: “He stood in front of me and did like baseball. Boom, boom, boom. But the first blow was from behind which I did not see.”

Later, when describing the same first blow, she recounted “it was really seconds. As he lowered him (the boy AK) to the floor, I went straight around to catch the boy because it was a boy running, and then straight I got the knockout.”

She had one moment of enlightenment while lying on the floor and being beaten: she should try to get out of the situation before she loses her life. “I say ‘what shall I do?’, And he is silent, not shouting at me, and I did not understand at first,” she said in the interrogation. “Then I say – if I want to be rescued I have to shout. And I shout ‘Rescue, neighbors. Call the police. I’m in distress. Then he sat on me and strangled me with both his hands and told me’ I’ll die already ‘and the boy next door.

“Then he stopped for a few seconds, and I raised my head. I spat out my broken teeth and told him to sing to the boy because he was crying, to calm him down. The boy would lie next to me, crying, crying, screaming. How long he cried. Poor thing. I said, ‘Aviad. “I do not take the child from you, he stays with both of us, week after week.” Then he told me, “You will not be his mother.” He took a knife out of the cutlery drawer.

During the interrogation, when Shira was shown pictures of the knife with which she was stabbed, she said that it was a knife for cutting roast that was hardly used at home. Until then she thought she was stabbed with the knife she used in holiday preparations, with a smaller blade.

Iscove began to lose consciousness but just then her neighbors heard her screams, knocked on the door and asked to enter. The light from outside signaled to her that help had arrived. “I felt a light so it seemed to me that the door had opened and closed,” she said in her testimony. “I heard knocks on the door but I did not hear anyone enter the house. Only then did the neighbor’s witness hold me, put me on her and told me ‘Shira, everything is fine, the ambulance is on its way, stay conscious, I will take care of your son’. I asked them to take care of the child I can’t breathe, so I fainted and woke up two days ago. “

Iscove recounted all this in two long interrogations while still suffering excruciating pain. The transcript of the interrogation is full of long lines in which she described in detail the pains she is dealing with: “I have pressures. No headaches. Like screws that rotate them and it hurts more. Rotate the pain harder.”

On the recording of the attempted murder she said: “It’s hard for me to hear it. I see it on the news and do not understand that it is me. Then it was recorded.”

Iscove is currently in the midst of a rehabilitation process. Long hours are devoted to the recovery process she has not yet completed. At the same time, the trial of Moshe is expected to begin soon, who throughout his interrogations did not recount to his interrogators what happened that evening, usually maintained his right to remain silent and accused Iscov of violence – verbal and physical – against him.

At the end of his last interrogation, his interrogators slapped him for trying to portray himself as a victim, and shared with him a version presented by his wife. “She is the one who brought us back from death,” they told him.