Police are still trying to determine whether the bullet that hit five-year-old Uriah Levy came as stray gunfire or was a deliberate shot as he sat on a bench outside the synagogue with his 10-year-old sister.
At first, his sister didn’t know what happened.
“She only heard the explosion and saw her brother fall down,” said the father, Avinoam in an interview with the Hebrew-language Walla! news website.
“When at first police arrived on the scene, I asked if there had been gunshots and he said, ‘not for certain.’ My wife called it in and said there were gunshots and the police asked her if maybe she hadn’t imagined it and she told the dispatcher, ‘Look, I am a nurse.’ Last year, a bullet landed in a neighbor’s balcony. That too, was ignored.”
It was only when the little boy actually arrived home with a hole in his pants that the family realized that Uriah, still complaining about pain, had been the one who was shot.
The little boy was taken by his very shocked parents to Hadassah Medical Center, where the bullet was located with a CT and then removed by surgeons.
The little boy then received antibiotics, his mother said, and is now in good condition.
But the child’s father said unfortunately gunfire in the neighborhood is “nothing out of the ordinary.”
He added that the sound of gunfire is frightening to their little boy, who talks all day long about “shootings and explosions.” Due to the frequency of attacks, he said, “We have become immune to the sound of shooting.”
All except Uriah, who asks his mother to sleep with him, because “maybe there will be another explosion.”