Everyone who knew them marveled at the strong bond between the four Dee sisters. If one of them needed advice or support, another sister was always ready to help. Often all four – Maia, 20, Keren, 19, Tali, 17 and 15-year-old Rina – would meet in a bedroom in the family home, usually with Maia.
“We loved hanging out as a group and talking about anything and everything,” Tali recalls. “We’ve always said we have each other’s backs.”
They went shopping, hiked in the hills near home, visited cafes and restaurants, and left loving messages to one another. Whenever someone bought a new outfit, she would post a picture to her WhatsApp group, The Sisters, and wait for the verdicts to come down.
“It’s so difficult because when I look at it now, the group is half empty,” says Tali.
It refers to the murders of Maia and Rina, who were killed instantly when Palestinian terrorists fired Kalashnikov bullets at their Nissan Micra as they drove to Tiberias on the shores of the Sea of Galilee for a family vacation.
SURVIVOR: Tali and Keren Dee, who lost their sisters Maia and Rina and their mother Lucy in a terrorist attack
TRAGEDY: Leo and Lucy Dee with their children Keren (19), Maia (20) and Rina (15), both killed in the attack, son Yehuda (14) and Tali (17).
After the car crash, the gunmen opened fire again, this time at close range.
Tali should have been in the car driven by her mother Lucy, 48, but she was feeling tired that morning April 7 so she chose the ‘quieter option’, with her father Leo, 51, and the 14-year-old to travel. old brother Yehuda. They were 30 minutes ahead of Lucy’s car when the attack happened.
On the other hand, Keren, who is sitting next to Tali today, planned to come to the family the next day. They speak at the family home in Efrat, a West Bank Jewish settlement nine miles south of Jerusalem, where the Dee family – all British-born – settled after moving to Israel from Hertfordshire in 2014 to start a new life.
Tali wonders aloud why her mother chose to take the detour through the Jordan Valley, where the gunmen were waiting to ambush the first Israeli-registered car that passed, and says it’s because Lucy, a nature lover, brought the new would have seen blooming flowers on the roadside. Keren disagrees, saying she always took the faster route unless the sat nav told her otherwise.
I was so happy and proud that she was able to save another person’s life
Either way, they’ll never know, because Lucy, the mainstay of the close-knit Dee family, never regained consciousness and died of her wounds three days later.
Five people later received organs donated by Lucy, including her heart.
At her sisters’ funeral, Keren had begged her to wake up and not let the family fall apart. But deep in her heart, she knew that all hope was lost and by the age of seven they became a family of four.
The killings drew global attention at a time of heightened tensions in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the attackers were later tracked down and killed by Israeli security forces.
“Our mother was such a strong, extraordinary woman,” says Keren. “She meant everything to us and so did our sisters.” As she speaks, relatives from England are preparing lunch in a spacious kitchen filled with family pictures. “Our mother wanted a big kitchen so we could all cook together, usually with music playing,” says Keren.
EMOTIONAL: Keren listens to her mother’s heartbeat at recipient Lital Valenci
Tali adds: “We always came home with the smell of home cooking and fresh bread. Every Friday the four of us would watch The Great British Bake Off with her and after that she would bake something inspired by the show.
Tali remembers saying goodbye to her mother in the hospital. “I held her hand and laid my head gently on her chest and listened to her heartbeat before they turned off the machine.” Then, a week later, after her heart was donated, I heard it beating inside someone else. Unbelievable.’
I can’t digest that it’s over. It’s impossible to put it into words
Keren nods in agreement. If it is possible for something positive to emerge from what is happening, then this is it. “She was such a generous person. “That last act was so typical of her, so fitting,” she says.
In order to arm themselves against the pain, they occupy themselves during the day. And the organ donations give them a sense of hope and pride, even if it’s hard to see beyond their desolation.
The recipient of Lucy’s heart was Lital Valenci, 51, who had suffered from severe heart failure for five years.
“There is no greater act than giving life, and Lucy Dee did that for me,” she says. “I was so moved to learn who gave me a heart from reading what an incredible woman she was with an exemplary family.”
“I will forever be grateful to Lucy and her family for thinking of helping others during the most tragic time of their lives.”
“That person is me and I will live in gratitude every day.”
During an emotional meeting with her donor’s surviving daughters at the hospital, Ms Valenci pressed a stethoscope to her chest and asked Keren, while doctors and nurses tearfully looked on, “Can you hear her heartbeat?”
I couldn’t bear the thought of someone else’s family being broken up
Keren says of that moment, “It was really like being with my mother again, with a part of her.” And then you open your eyes and you realize she’s not there. But I was so happy and proud that she was able to save the life of another human being who hopefully can live for a long time.
“It’s incredible that in a way she was able to live on in someone else.”
She adds: “The doctor who performed the transplant came up to me with tears in his eyes afterwards and said that throughout the operation he had been thinking about what I said about my mother at the funeral.”
In her eulogy, Keren told the mourners, ‘I can’t take it that it’s over.’ It’s impossible to put into words.’
She now says, “The doctor told me that my words really urged him to make the transplant a success and to do his best.” For her part, Tali says as she listened to the heartbeat through the stethoscope, I found myself thinking to say goodbye to my mother.
Lucy Dee’s three surviving children mourn the loss of her body during her funeral at the Kfar Etzion settlement cemetery in the occupied West Bank on April 11, 2023
At her sisters’ funeral, Keren had begged her to wake up and not let the family fall apart. But deep in her heart, she knew that all hope was lost and by the age of seven they became a family of four
“But then I thought about this woman and her partner and their four children.
“I couldn’t face the thought of someone else’s family falling apart like ours, so I was just so glad that this donation could bring them all together so they could move on as a family.”
One of Lucy’s kidneys saved the life of a 38-year-old Arab man from Nazareth, something the girls say would have made their mother proud. He presented the family with a memorial plaque inscribed with a prayer.
Leo Dee had studied chemical engineering at Cambridge University and worked in the city’s private equity sector before training to become a rabbi. Lucy, an English teacher, was studying Japanese at Oxford, where the couple met.
Keren and Tali describe Rina, who helped run a youth club, as being smart and mature beyond her age.
As the eldest, Maia’s position in the family brought immediate responsibility and the sisters remember her as a role model, spreading wisdom from their bedroom.
Socially conscious like Rina, she tutored underprivileged children and helped with a summer camp aimed at promoting better understanding between Jewish and Arab children. “One of the things I liked to do with Maia was have a coffee, go to the mountains to a new place I had found and just talk about life,” says Keren.
Tali describes the day of the attack and how excited they were to leave on vacation before the trip ended abruptly.
Unclear early reports suggesting the car was a Kia and that the elderly woman involved was in her 30s had given them false hope.
But within hours that was replaced first by panicked disbelief and then by a dawning acceptance.
The plan called for the two cars to meet at a beautiful location before embarking on the final leg of the journey. Minutes before the attack, Maia and Tali exchanged texts. “She asked where we were,” says Tali.
Later, a relative brought the news to Tali and her father. When they scoured the internet for reports, they spotted what they believed to be the family’s green beach bag in a picture of the crime scene, but weren’t sure.
They thought the car looked similar, but again couldn’t be sure. They turned back and were met by a roadblock.
“Ambulances and soldiers were everywhere,” says Tali. “We could see the car in the distance but weren’t sure and they wouldn’t let us through.”
There were tears and screams and frantic phone calls. Keren was ordered to go to a hospital in Jerusalem, where the injured woman was airlifted.
Mourners attended the funeral of two British-Israeli sisters Maia and Rina Dee at a cemetery in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Kfar Etzion on Sunday, April 9, 2023
Lucy Dee, 45, a British-Israeli woman who died of her injuries three days after an alleged Palestinian gun attack that also killed two of her daughters
At that point, no one knew her identity.
But while Keren sat and waited in the emergency room, a close family friend, a paramedic, called and said a helicopter would land in the next two minutes with her mother at the hospital.
“We pray that your mother is well,” she said.
Meanwhile, Tali, her father and brother ran from the scene to the same hospital after their worst fears were confirmed. On the way, Tali phoned her grandparents – her mother’s parents – in England.
Stunned with shock, she was bluntly matter-of-fact, robotically begging them to come to Israel, saying, “Maia and Rina are dead and Mama is in critical condition.”
At the hospital, Keren begged the doctors to allow her to visit her mother, but “they warned me that she was not well and that it would not be good for me.”
I miss Lucy, Maia and Rina every minute of the day
Her sisters’ funeral the day after the murders drew thousands of people. On the way, as Tali sat on her sister’s knees in the car, they saw thousands more people lining the streets in front of their homes in Efrat. “It was an incredible response,” says Tali.
About Efrat in the Judean Mountains, her father said in a recent interview: “It is the Oxbridge of the religious community of Israel.” There are so many doctors, teachers, academics, rabbis and nurses here, educated people who contribute to the wider world want to afford.
“Many don’t seem to understand that we live very closely with Palestinian Arabs. “We live in peace with these dear, decent Muslims.”
He wrote a book entitled “Transforming The World” in which he set out his vision of how different races and religions can live in harmony while celebrating differences and sees it as his mission to spread the message “not only in Israel, but all over the world”.
His children, he says, were taught to be independent.
He adds, “Of course I miss Lucy, Maia and Rina every minute of the day, but the amazing things Keren, Tali and Yehuda are doing bring me joy and satisfaction and are a great comfort at this time.”