“I’m really shocked, I can’t process it,” the girl’s mother said. The child is expected to make a full recovery.
By Adina Katz, World Israel News
A seven-year-old Israeli girl was shot in the stomach on Saturday morning while playing in the front yard of her home in Kochav Ya’akov, a Jewish town in Samaria some 10 minutes north of Jerusalem.
The girl, identified by Hebrew-language media as Bracha Solam, was transported by Magen David Adom (MDA) paramedics to Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem.
“A seven-year-old girl was evacuated to the emergency room by MDA, with a superficial wound to her stomach, apparently due to gunfire,” the hospital said in a press statement on Saturday.
“She is currently being treated by the medical center’s staff for urgent and surgical care teams, fully conscious and in moderate condition.”
The girl’s mother, Yael Solam, said the child is expected to make a full recovery.
“I’m really shocked, I can’t process it,” Solam told Walla News.
“The doctor said it’s really a miracle that [the bullet] went in and out. Today it’s my daughter, tomorrow it could happen to other children.”
Solam added that her daughters usually spend Saturday afternoons “playing in the garden” in front of their home. But on this Saturday, the girls “suddenly came back very upset and scared.”
Initially, the said that someone had hit her with a thorn. The mother then lifted up the child’s shirt and saw an entry-and-exit wound from the bullet and a large amount of blood.
The IDF said in a statement that the girl was likely shot accidentally by a “stray bullet” fired from the direction of Qalandiya, a nearby Palestinian Authority-controlled Arab town. However, a security official expressed doubt over that characterization of the incident.
Speaking to Israel National News, the official said he believed that terrorists had intentionally shot at the town and that the perpetrators had successfully fled the scene and evaded capture.