11 April 2023 , 14:01
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The grieving children left behind after three British-Israelis were slaughtered in a terror attack on Friday have spoken of being "paralysed by pain" at their mother's funeral.
Maia, 20, Rina, 16, and Lucy Dee, 45, were in a car travelling through Hamra, an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, when their car was attacked by a gunman who mowed them down with several rounds shot from an AK-47 assault rifle.
Lucy's daughter Karen sobbed uncontrollably as she eulogised her mother in front of the hundreds who had gathered to mourn with them at a synagogue in the Efrat settlement.
She said: "Yesterday, beside the grave of Maia and Rina, I closed my eyes and prayed that you would wake up, so that we wouldn't need to go through this pain twice.
"My heart is already so full of pain, I am paralysed by all the pain.
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"To lose your mother is like losing your life. I don't want to move on."
Karen Dee, the sister and daughter of the British-Israelis slaughtered in the West Bank on Friday, eulogises her mother at her funeral today (xxxxxxxxxxx)When asked to sum up her mother, she added: "Everyone will move on, and just us will remain behind with this hole that cannot be filled. Even in a thousand words, I cannot summarise you."
Karen lamented her bleak future, now having no mother to walk her down the aisle.
She said: "Who will accompany me to the wedding canopy? I cannot return to routine. I cannot accept that it is over.
"I do not know how to end the eulogy, because no matter how I end it I will never succeed in fitting in everything."
Lucy's husband Leo Dee, who moved the family to Israel after quitting his job as an investment banker, also added to the tribute, saying: "We literally traveled the world together, we made aliyah together.
"We built a new life for ourselves in the promised land.
Maia, Rina and Lucy Dee (left)"You would frequently say that you couldn't imagine living anywhere else, nor could I, even now, especially now."
Leo has spoken several times on the tragedy, today adding he will be "haunted" after missing a call from one of his daughters during the attack.
Both girls were killed at the scene. Lucy was airlifted to hospital in critical condition after being hit with two bullets - one in her brain stem and another lodged at the top of her spine.
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Talking about how he received the dreadful news, Leo wept as he recalled receiving a call from his sister to tell him a vehicle in the area had been attacked.
He called Maia, Rina and Lucy, but none of them answered. .
Relatives carry the bodies of the two sisters after the killing on Friday (ABIR SULTAN/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)“Then I saw a missed call from Maia 10.52am,” he said.
“I hadn’t noticed it ring and had not picked up the phone. The feeling that she called me during the attack and I wasn’t able to speak to her will come back and haunt me for a while.”
Tali, Dee's other daughter, was in the car with him at the time. She saw a photo on Instagram of a bullet-riddled car containing blood-soaked suitcases.
He immediately knew "the suitcases were ours".
After realising his family were in trouble, he hit the pedal and "drove like a lunatic" to the scene.
“By this point we knew that two younger girls had been killed by a terrorist with an automatic Kalashnikov rifle… and the older woman had been airlifted to Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital in Jerusalem.
Heartbroken husband Rabbi Leo Dee (right) and his late wife (left) (Facebook)“I wanted to go to be with Lucy in the hospital but we couldn’t believe that this was our car, our family. So I wanted to see the girls, or at least the car for myself.
“After what seemed like a lifetime (it was actually three lifetimes) I convinced them to bring us an ID card that they had rescued from the scene. It was Maia’s.
“I went numb. I didn’t cry yet. I was highly rational. I went back to the car and drove another hour and a half to the hospital.”
Lucy's death comes amid severely heightened tensions in the often tense West Bank.
Israeli troops shot 15-year-old Palestinian boy Mohammad Fayez in the head, chest and stomach in a refugee camp in Jericho.
Relatives mourn during the ceremony for Maia and Rina (AFP via Getty Images)The teenager's aunt Maysoon said: "They shot him in the head. What is going to happen to our people? What will happen to us?"
Israel captured the West Bank, along with the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, in the 1967 Mideast war. It has built dozens of settlements in the territory that are now home to more than 500,000 Jewish settlers.
Most of the international community considers Israel's West Bank settlements illegal and an obstacle to peace with the Palestinians. The Palestinians seek the West Bank, along with Gaza and east Jerusalem for their future independent state.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government has made settlement expansion a top priority.