Two children, ages 1 and 4, die of neglect on same day

Tragedy strikes Israeli children and their families twice in one day.

By LIDAR GRAVÉ-LAZI
Updated: MARCH 30, 2018 03:19
Magen David Adom ambulances (photo credit: MAGEN DAVID ADOM)
Magen David Adom ambulances
(photo credit: MAGEN DAVID ADOM)
Two small children died in separate tragedies on Wednesday, one in the South and one in Tel Aviv.
A four-year-old boy died in Netivot after he was left in a car outside his home for two hours in the heavy heat.
The Magen David Adom team carried out resuscitation efforts on the boy, then evacuated him in critical condition to Soroka-University Medical Center in Beersheba, where doctors pronounced his death.
Shimon Vaknin, a neighbor of the family, told Channel 2 News, “I heard yelling, I went outside and saw the father shouting, ‘The boy, the boy!’ I asked him what happened and he said he was forgotten in the car.”
Vaknin said, “I told the father to start resuscitation and I tried to call MDA but wasn’t able to connect to a network. I tried for a few minutes and after that we called from a landline. This is very frustrating, already a month and half there is no [cellular] network, and this time it brought a terrible tragedy.”
Uriel Dahan, an emergency medic with MDA, said: “Inside the house we saw a toddler around four years old, unconscious, without a pulse and not breathing... he was hot to the touch and suffering from signs of heat stroke.”
“We were told that he had been in a closed vehicle, apparently for a long time. We gave him medical treatment and carried out advanced and prolonged resuscitation operations and he was evacuated to Soroka Hospital in critical condition while having CPR performed on him,” Dahan said.
The Beterem-Safe Kids Israel organization said on Wednesday that in the past decade there have been 647 incidents of children being left in or locked in cars, of which 27 resulted in deaths.
ALSO ON Wednesday, a one-year-old died in a daycare center in south Tel Aviv.
This was the first death in some two years in south Tel Aviv in a childcare center for the families of foreign workers – which have been dubbed “child warehouses” – due to overcrowding and negligence.
“His name was Osher (“Joy”) and he was a year old and the only son of his parents, an Israeli mother and a father seeking refuge. Today his life is over,” Yael Gvirtz, CEO of Elipelet, an organization that provides aid to children of migrants, wrote on her Facebook page.
While the circumstances of the death remain unclear and are under investigation by the police, Gvirtz said, “He was taken there by his mother in the early afternoon straight from the hospital, where it had been decided not to hospitalize him, just as had been decided there the day before.
“He was brought to the babysitter because his mother was afraid to lose her job after two days where she had to run to the hospital with the baby,” she said.