A 7-year-old girl who had fallen into a gushing river on Friday was rushed to Tel Hashomer Medical Center where she was pronounced dead.
The severe weather of the past week in Israel turned the country’s slow and harmless rivers into gushing, foaming white waters, and one such river, near the Modi’in Orthodox Jewish neighborhood od Kiryat Sefer, was where the girl fell in and drowned.
The girl’s father said the river near his house was raging when his daughter apparently slipped and became adrift. Police and firefighters, as well as MDA teams, searched the river channel, and the lake which had been created by the heavy rain, in an attempt to locate the child.
Finally, she was found in the stream by a mobilized Zaka (a humanitarian voluntary organization) unit. After rescue forces pulled her from the water, a police helicopter carried her to a waiting intensive care van, where she was revived.
However, after reaching the Tel Hashomer Medical Center, doctors at the Edmond and Lily Safra Children’s Wing had to determine her death, and deliver the message to her father.
The hospital said that the child arrived without a pulse and her body temperature was very low, and that a full hour of resuscitation efforts did not help. They had to call her death.