Two children were killed in a car accident on Route 90 in the Arava on Thursday.
Sisters Shirel and Mila Ben-Simon, who had made aliyah with their family from France less than a year ago, died in the collision. They were four and seven years old.
Later in the day, a five-year-old boy was killed in an accident in Lod. The police have opened an investigation into the accident.
The funeral for the sisters was set for 11 p.m.
Five other people were wounded in the two-car collision on Route 90, including the driver, a couple in their 30s who were seriously injured, and a 35-year-old woman and a three-year-old boy in moderate condition.
All of the wounded, including two trapped inside their vehicle, were evacuated by helicopter to Soroka-University Medical Center in Beersheba.
“I traveled with my family on the way back from a vacation in Eilat,” said MDA paramedic Ra’anan Chacham. “Near Paran I saw the serious accident, in which two vehicles collided head-on. A man and a woman were trapped in a vehicle near the road. I immediately stopped and quickly scanned the scene to assess the condition of the wounded.
“With the help of a military medical force that arrived on the scene and the MDA forces from the nearby communities, we gave medical treatment to the injured and carried out advanced and prolonged resuscitation operations on the two girls... and unfortunately, we had to declare their death. [There were] five wounded, including three seriously wounded and two moderately wounded.”
According to the Or Yarok traffic safety advocacy association, 129 people have been killed in the past decade on Route 90, which is the country’s longest highway stretching from Metulla in the north to Taba on the Egyptian border. There have been almost 1,300 accidents in which approximately 3,400 people were injured, 359 of them severely.
Seven people have been killed in accidents on the road this year.
“Route 90 is a bloody road that in the past year has claimed the lives of 20 people, and nothing has been done,” said Erez Kita, director-general of Or Yarok. “Every trip on the road is like Russian roulette – and although it is clear to everyone that people will continue to be killed on the road, there has been no activity [made] for the safety of road users. The road must be turned into two driving lanes with a rigid separation barrier to prevent accidents.”