…And though in a land of peace thou art secure, yet how wilt thou do in the thickets of the Jordan? (Jeremiah 12:5)

A retired IDF colonel was beaten to death with crowbars and axes in his home in the Jordan Valley late Thursday night, according to The Times of Israel. The victim’s girlfriend, who escaped out the backdoor of the house in the Judea and Samarian vacation village of Brosh HaBika, identified the killers as two Palestinians.

The couple had apparently head noises outside the home, and when the male went out to investigate the source he was viciously attacked by what several news outlets described as axes and crowbars.

The women sustained light injuries while fleeing the scene. She stopped a passing car on a nearby road at approximately 1 a.m. local time, reported Ynet, and called for help. She was taken to HaEmek Medical Center in Afula by a Magen David Adom crew.

A large IDF presence has been dispatched to the area and roadblocks have been put up throughout the Jordan Valley. Though security officials believe the incident to have been a terrorist attack, they are also investigating the possibility that the act was criminal in nature, according to Ynet.

An eyewitness who was passing through the area told Walla News that she saw the female victim with her leg “completely injured” on the road.

“We thought that it was a car accident, and then we realized what had happened,” said the witness, a Jerusalem resident. “She related that they heard the dog barking, her [boyfriend] went outside, and then she saw they were beating him with clubs and iron rods. The woman ran away via the back door.”

The female victim’s daughter later added, after speaking with the victim at the hospital, that her mother had followed her boyfriend outside and heard voices in Arabic and saw flashlights.

She said her mother had escaped through the bushes, and that “she crawled there for two hours, with no phone, no nothing.”

This is the fourth reported terror attack by Palestinians in Judea and Samaria in the last several weeks. On Monday, two Palestinian men were arrested in connection to an October 5 terror attack in the West Bank settlement of Psagot. In that attack, a gunman infiltrated the settlement and shot a 9-year-old girl. She was lightly wounded.

Last month two 20 year old IDF soldiers were killed in cold blood by Palestinian terrorists in separate incidents just three days apart.