"I woke up and realized I have no legs": Tehila Cohen on the terror attack that changed her life

Tehila Cohen was eight years old, a third-grade student, when she boarded the regular shuttle from Kfar Darom to school in the morning. Along with her in the bus were two of her siblings, aged 12 and six.

"A minute after we left the settlement, there was a crazy explosion," she recalls in a conversation with Hani Lifshitz. A roadside bomb detonated against the bus hit the passengers and changed the family's life in one moment.

Tehila remained conscious. "You understand and don't understand what is happening. Everything is very blurry," she says. She remembers the soldiers who arrived, the evacuation, and the person who sat next to her in the ambulance and recited Psalms with her so she would stay conscious.

At the hospital, the extent of the injury became clear: both her legs were amputated below the knee, and she also lost two and a half of her fingers. Her six-year-old brother lost one leg below the knee, as did her 12-year-old sister.

"It became part of life"

Memories from the days after the attack are fragmented. Tehila remembers operating rooms, anesthesia, family members surrounding her, and the realization that dawned upon a new reality.

"I realized I have no legs," she says. However, as a child, she says, she was not always able to understand the full meaning. The treatment, rehabilitation, and return to life happened almost in parallel.

After about two or three months, she already returned to school, and after about nine months, she learned to walk with prosthetics. According to her, the treatment she received from her surroundings was not one of pity. "We were heroes," she recalls. "It was cool to be my friend."

She attributes a large part of the way she coped to the home in which she grew up. "Difficulty alongside strength," she defines the family approach. Her parents did not seek to make the home one that operates around the injury, but directed the children to return as much as possible to the normal path of life.

The home for which she paid a price

Several years after the attack, the disengagement from Gush Katif arrived, and the family was forced to leave Kfar Darom.

For Tehila, the pain was double. It was not only the loss of the home and the community, but also the separation from the place where her family chose to live out of a sense of mission, and where she herself was severely wounded.

"It was shocking, and it is still shocking today," she says. Despite the difficult years that preceded the evacuation, the fear of terror attacks, and the security reality, she and her family wanted to stay.

On the day of the evacuation, according to her, there was special sensitivity towards families who had lost or were wounded in terror attacks. The family left together with the Torah scrolls from the synagogue and also reached the memorial for Miri Amitai and Gabi Biton, who were killed in the bus attack.

"Difficulty meets difficulty"

At the age of 16, deeper questions began for Tehila about what she had gone through. "Why life? Why the suffering in the world? What is the purpose?" she recalls.

Later, she chose to study social work and work with teenagers. In a certain way, the personal experience became a tool in her work.

"Difficulty meets difficulty," she says. "The teenagers I work with, without speech and without words, feel it immediately. That it is possible to tell me everything, that I will not collapse, that I will understand."

According to her, the fact that her coping is visible to the eye sometimes creates an immediate connection with whoever is sitting in front of her. She does not hide the prosthetics, but also does not define herself through them.

Today, as she also looks at the war wounded who have lost hands and legs, Tehila knows there is no one way to cope. She herself grew up into this reality from the age of eight. Only with the years did she understand how much that morning on the bus shaped the way she looks at life, at difficulty, and at strength.