A distraught Ashkelon woman, the mother of disabled teenagers, held police at bay for hours on Sunday afternoon threatening to blow herself up with a gas canister she had in her vehicle. One of her children was with her in the van.

The woman was demanding assistance in purchasing two specialized wheelchairs for her children.

At one point, she collided her vehicle into a police car. Damage was minimal. A representative of Israel’s disabled community explained the mother does not receive appropriate responses to her continued requests for assistance, but frequently receives “canned responses” that rarely meet her difficult needs.

He explained that just the very same day, Sunday morning, a son who is wheelchair bound does not have the appropriate wheelchair and as a result, fell over in the morning and was injured as a result, now hospitalized in Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital.

(Yechiel Spira – YWN Israel)