After the commotion died down and most of the young people had fled the place, a large puddle of blood was left behind. Right beside it lay a teenager, barely 18, fluttering between life and death. Stricken by panic, his friends kneeled beside him in a state of total loss. Some of them cried. Others screamed and called for help. By the time the police arrived, just a few minutes later, there was no one left to save. Just before 3 a.m. on April 21, Yiftah Grady was pronounced dead, only a few meters from the Shesh nightclub in the Tel Aviv suburb Raanana, where he had been partying with his friends a few minutes earlier.
On the day after his funeral, Benny Yannai, the father of one of Yiftah’s closest friends, said that he actually felt glad when he learned that his son would not be getting a leave from the army for Passover. His wife, on the other hand, was upset. “I told my wife Tali that I feel a lot safer when he’s on the base than when he’s wandering the streets and going out at night,” he wrote in a very moving piece published by the Israeli news website Walla in the wake of the stabbing. “When I heard about Yiftah's death, those harsh words turned into a very cruel reality. Yiftah grew up with my son. During all those years, I watched how they and all of their friends turned from being happy little kids with big smiles on their faces into lovely teenagers. … You bring a child into the world and invest your whole life in him. You tell him bedtime stories, snuggle with him on the couch and fall asleep with him in your arms. You promise him that he will always be safe, and he knows that you would be willing to sacrifice everything just to keep that promise. Then, suddenly it all ends in an instant.”
