Friends of a Christian woman stabbed in a bus attack in Jerusalem are calling for prayers as she recovers from multiple wounds and a punctured lung.
Marika, believed to be in her 60s and originally from Holland, had been renting a house in Jerusalem and caring for Palestinian orphans and children from difficult backgrounds.
She was on the Number 78 bus in the Armon hanatziv neighbourhood of Jerusalem when two men boarded, one armed with a knife and the other with a gun and began shooting and stabbing passengers indiscriminately, injuring 16 and killing two.
One For Israel reported that Marika is now in a stable condition in hospital "but badly needs our prayers", as do the scores of the victims that have been wounded physically and emotionally in the violent attacks that have been happening all over Israel.
The blog reports that it was from the roof of her house that the British Major-General Charles Gordon was surveying the landscape just north of the Old City, and saw that the rock formation before him looked uncannily like a skull, leading to his supporting the theory that this was Golgotha, site of the Crucifixion, rather than the traditional site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Horatio Spafford, writer of the hymn, 'It is well with my soul' is also said to have also stayed in that house. "And now Marika, a heroine in her own right, joins the list of people of note," One For Israel said. "Whatever difficulties and background the Palestinian children had come from, Marika graciously cared for them and raised them as her own in an atmosphere of love, and the love of the Lord."
The attack was one of four separate terror assaults at almost the same time on the same day. "Two victims are dead; 16 are injured, some of them very seriously. This was an attack in which the outcome could have easily been much, much worse: the goal of the two terrorists, one armed with a gun and the other with a knife, was evidently to take control of the bus by force and use it to do even more serious harm," This Ongoing War reported.
The blog commented that all the perpetrators that day were holders of Israeli identity papers. It added: "For reasonably intelligent observers, it's evident that a web of interlocking influencers within the PA and Hamas regime governments - their civil services (such as they are), their mosques and youth groups and schools - has been and continues to be involved in churning out battle-field-ready young people, boys and girls, their heads filled with visions of glory and a readiness - even a passion - for death."
