Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Parents of Slain 4-Year-Old Israeli Boy Write Letter to Ban Ki-Moon

The parents of a 4-year-old boy killed in a mortar attack at his home on a kibbutz near the Gaza border in a letter called on the head of the United Nations to speak out about Hamas’ war crimes.

“Daniel was killed from a mortar shell that was fired by Hamas members from an elementary school for boys in Gaza City,” Gila and Doron Tragerman wrote in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sent on Thursday, the Israeli daily Yediot Acharonot reported. “It wasn’t a stray shell. It wasn’t accidental death.”

The Tragerman family reportedly had left their home during the first three weeks of Israel’s operation in Gaza, but returned nearly a week before Daniel’s death after security officials told residents it would be safe. But rockets began hitting the area again when the cease-fire was broken on Aug. 19.

The family reportedly had planned to leave the kibbutz on the day Daniel was killed by shrapnel from the mortar attack. The Tragerman’s letter criticized the U.N. commission of inquiry, set up and charged with investigating whether Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip constitute as war crimes.

“The investigation Committee is not asked to investigate how terrorists shoot out of UN buildings and schools,” they wrote. “The Committee is not asked to investigate how inside buildings of the United Nations and in hospitals in Gaza terrorist infrastructure flourishes and maintains over time, or how from these places terrorist left for activity aimed against innocent people.”

The letter told Ban about their family and their son, what life under the threat of rockets from Gaza has been like for the last several years, and about the day Daniel died.

“He died in our hands, in front of his little sister and best friend Yuval, 3.5 years old. He died in front of Uri, only four months old and right before our eyes, his mother and father. We failed. We couldn’t protect our beautiful and talented baby,” the letter said.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.

Exit mobile version