Five days after the attack on the Sarona center in Tel Aviv, where four Israeli civilians had been murdered, Assaf Bar, who was shot twice in the head while sitting inside the Max Brenner Café, very close to the table where the two well dressed terrorists were sitting, is going home.
“I was the first one to be hit,” Bar recalled on Monday. “Of the shots themselves I don’t remember a lot. I slid toward the table. I was hearing, and I remember flashes of consciousness, in which I talked a little with my girlfriend, a little with the man who took me to the ambulance, a little with my dad on the phone, on the way to the hospital,” he reported.
He said that now, “thank God, I feel better. I still have headaches now and then, some trouble hearing, but I hope to get stronger. I feel stronger with every passing day.”
Bar presented the two scars in the back of his head, each from a bullet shot by the terrorists. The doctors took out one of them and decided to leave the other inside for the time being.
Dr. Ido Straus, who was on call during the Sarona attack, told reporters the first bullet “was very accessible, the other less so, and it does not pose a danger for now. In the future we’ll decide what to do with it, he might stay with the bullet inside. He hemorrhaged, which could have caused his death in a short period of time, and stopping the flow of blood prevented a collapse.”