11-Year-Old Israeli Girl Improves After West Bank Firebomb Attack
Image by haaretz
An 11-year-old Israeli girl severely injured in a firebomb attack in the West Bank is showing signs of improvement.
Ayala Shapira was rushed to the Chaim Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv after the attack Thursday evening. She had severe burns to her upper body and face. Her father sustained minor injuries in the attack on their car.
Doctors treating Shapira told Army Radio Friday that her condition had improved slightly overnight but that her life is still in danger. She is being kept under sedation at the hospital’s emergency ward where doctors are trying to stabilize her condition.
“She has a very severe injury because she has a deep burn in the facial area and the scalp,” said Eyal Winkler, director of Sheba’s plastic surgery department. “We are hoping for the best. It will be a long, protracted treatment with ups and downs.”
Avner Shapira was driving his daughter to their West Bank settlement El Matan from Bar Ilan University, where she attended a math class for gifted students, the news site Ynet.co.il reported. Avner said he saw a man ignite a firebomb and hurl it at the car, where it hit his daughter’s seat.
Army forces are searching for the individuals responsible for the attack.
Separately, on Friday two Border Police officers, ages 19 and 35, sustained minor injuries in Jerusalem’s Old City from an unidentified individual who stabbed them in the neck and arm and escaped.
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
