13-year-old critically hurt in Jerusalem stabbing released from hospital
2 weeks after attack, teen and 25-year-old victims of Pisgat Ze’ev attack discharged; 13-year-old stabber in custody
A 13-year-old Israeli boy who was critically wounded in a terror attack on October 12 in Jerusalem’s Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood was released from the hospital on Tuesday.
The boy was one of two Israeli victims stabbed by Ahmed and Hassan Manasra, 13 and 15, respectively.
He was taken to the hospital in life-threatening condition, placed in an induced coma and connected to a respirator. He woke up and began communicating with medical personnel and family members over a week ago.
Last week, as the boy regained consciousness, Prof. Ahmed Eid, head of the hospital’s Department of General Surgery, who operated on the boy, said he “has a long path of rehabilitation still ahead of him.”
Eid on Tuesday told Israel Radio the boy had been clinically dead upon his arrival to the hospital.
The family has declined to release the boy’s name or picture to the public.
A second victim of the terror attack, a 25-year-old man who was seriously injured, was discharged from the hospital earlier this week.
The boy was stabbed multiple times as he rode his bike through the Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood, and underwent resuscitation and emergency surgery, doctors said hours after the attack.
Doctors at the time said the surgery may have saved the boy’s life, but he was still in very serious condition, having lost a great deal of blood.
They praised the Magen David Adom rescue service for the speed with which the boy had been evacuated to the hospital, with one of the surgeons telling Channel 2 that he would likely not have survived otherwise.
He also happened to arrive at the hospital as doctors were changing shifts, and therefore all the key surgical personnel were available to treat him.
Ahmed Manasra, the younger of the stabbers, was seriously injured when he was hit by a car while trying to flee the scene of the attack. He was treated in Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital and arrested upon his release. His 15-year-old cousin was shot dead by security forces after charging at police with a knife.
Manasra is the youngest attacker in a wave of Palestinian stabbing and shooting attacks against Israelis that began at the start of this month. The average age of the attackers is estimated at between 19 and 20 years old.
Manasra became the center of an Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic spat after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas spoke out against “aggression by Israel and its settlers, who commit terror against our people,” and who “execute our children in cold blood, as they did to the child Ahmed Manasra and other children in Jerusalem and elsewhere.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Abbas of spreading “incitement and lies” in his claim. An official from Abbas’s office later walked back the accusation, saying the PA chief was misled.
