A 48-year-old resident of the Tel Aviv suburb of Holon was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of bludgeoning and stabbing his nine-months-pregnant wife to death, in an incident which occurred while four of their seven chidren were in the home, police said.

When Magen David Adom paramedics arrived at Peleg Tadasa's apartment at 3 A.M. Tuesday, she had apparently been dead for about an hour. The paramedics tried and failed to save the fetus.

The wife had bruises and knife wounds all over her body. Police suspect that the husband bludgeoned her with a hammer and repeatedly stabbed her before he apparently attempted suicide.

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Police found the husband next to his wife. He appeared to have stabbed himself, and transferred him to Wolfson Hospital in moderate condition.

"We saw a man and a woman lying in a bed and there was blood all over the the room and on the bed," one of the officers who arrived on the scene said Wednesday.

The couple immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia two years ago. Welfare authorities are seeing to the four children who were in the house at time. The other three children were already in foster care.

"These are very small children, from 3 to 12 years old. We summoned a social worker to the scene to speak to them, and they were then transferred to the care of local welfare services," Commander of the Ayalon Police district Aharon Axel said on Tuesday

Police said they had no record of complaints of violence regarding the husband.

"The husband isn't communicating at the moment. It seems the couple had serious disputes in their marriage, the nature of which will become clear soon," Axel said.