A six-year old Chassidish boy in Maalot Dafna was playing on the porch of his third-floor apartment on Wednesday night when he suddenly ran into the house complaining of sharp pain in his back. His parents rushed him to Hadassah Ein Kerem, where doctors in the children’s emergency room found a bullet lodged in his shoulder.
No one knows how the bullet got there but it’s assumed that it was a stray bullet from East Jerusalem, which is across the highway from Maalot Dafna. Unfortunately, the phenomenon of children and adults being shot and even killed by stray bullets in Arab areas has become more and more common in recent years, and in fact, an Arab teacher was killed by a stray bullet on the first day of school about two weeks ago.
The child was hospitalized in stable condition and is expected to undergo surgery on Thursday, Kikar H’Shabbos reported. The family’s neighbors shared their shock with Kikar: “Are we living in a criminal area?” one neighbor said. “It’s an internal porch which doesn’t face the Arab villages.”
The police said it was not clear what happened and they are investigating the matter under the assumption that he was hit by a stray bullet.
The boy’s name for tefillah is Yehudah Aryeh ben Tamar Tziporah.
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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2 Responses
how do they know it was shot by an Arab? there are plenty of low class non gentiles living in that area too…..
That looks like a rifle bullet, 5.56mm. from an M-16/M-4. These are standard issue to the IDF. Some are also in the hands of the Palestinians. The Pallies, and other Arabs, have a dangerous tradition of shooting guns in the air for celebration. This so called “happy fire” often has the unhappy consequence of injuring random individuals, often their own people, with the stray rounds.