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‘This was no accident’: Israeli mother mourns death of young boy killed by Palestinian driver

Rivka Zinman charged that the Palestinian driver turned towards her vehicle and accelerated into them deliberately.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The mother of a six-year-old boy killed Wednesday in a car crash in the Binyamin region told Hebrew media that the Palestinian who rammed into them did it deliberately as an act of terrorism.

“We were driving on Route 60 on the way to a family event in Ariel,” Rivka Zinman of Shvut Rachel said from her bed in Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem.

The road was completely empty, she noted, when “suddenly, a white Arab car coming from the opposite lane made a sharp turn towards me and accelerated. I tried to get away but he simply rammed us.”

“My son, who was next to me, was seriously injured in his stomach, he underwent surgery. And my younger son – he was murdered,” Zinman added, speaking softly.

“This was not a traffic accident,” she insisted. “They wanted to hit me. They did hit me. I am asking that they open an investigation into this matter, which was really a terror attack…  I was fully conscious the entire time, I saw exactly what happened. It was intentional.”

Doctors spent hours trying to save little Matan’s life, but were ultimately unsuccessful. Besides his 10-year-old brother, two other siblings were also injured. His 12-year-old sister is in serious condition, while the baby of the family, just six months old, was lightly hurt.

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The two Arabs in the other car were taken to a hospital in the Palestinian Authority. No arrest has yet been made in the incident.

“The writing on the wall was smeared on the road in blood,” Otzma Yehudit party leader Itamar Ben-Gvir charged Thursday. “But like the weak reaction [of the authorities] in the ‘Guardian of the Walls’ riots, the roads of Judea and Samaria are also abandoned, and every terrorist can do what he wants, drive and kill.”

“If the state does not decide to allocate resources and deal decisively with terrorism on the road, it will only increase and continue to harm us,” he warned.

Route 60 is the main thoroughfare through much of Judea and Samaria, and residents have complained for years about wild Arab drivers, with not a police car in sight to make them think twice about committing their road infractions.

One resident of the region, Avi, told news site 0404 that everyone knows how dangerous it is to drive on the road.

“We scream that we’re sick and tired of it, but nobody cares, nobody does anything,” he said. “People don’t understand at all the really crazy things that are happening here. [A driver] can cross a solid white line and come out at you, and he knows he will finish you. It’s just complete lawlessness.”

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Binyamin Regional Council head Yisrael Gantz announced that there will be a demonstration at every junction of the highway Thursday evening, demanding the immediate formulation of an emergency plan for enforcement, along with immediate improvement in the road’s infrastructure.

“Sovereignty begins with our roads. Throughout Judea and Samaria, we see the insane driving of the Arabs, which endangers our lives, and the lack of police enforcement on the roads. Gush Etzion Regional Council Head Shlomo Ne’eman stated, calling for people to join the protests and “show our support to the residents of Binyamin after this horrible tragedy.”