2 toddler brothers die after being forgotten in sweltering car

Two brothers, aged 20 months and 3, were pronounced dead Wednesday from heatstroke after their father reportedly forgot them in a locked car in a school parking lot in the southern Negev town of Hura.

Paramedics called to the scene were unable to revive the two boys after they spent several hours in the sealed car. Temperatures in the Bedouin desert town climbed toward the day’s high of 35 degrees Celsius (95° Fahrenheit).

“When we arrived, they took us to a house [next to the school], where we saw the two children, who were unconscious, without a pulse or other signs of life,” Magen David Adom medic Raed Abu’ajaj was quoted as saying by the Haaretz newspaper.

“They told us that [the children] were rescued from a car after they were apparently stuck inside for several hours.”

As average summer temperatures have climbed in recent years, Israel has seen a spate of similar incidents in which young children are seriously hurt or die after being forgotten in a closed car.

As in recent years, the summer of 2016 has already seen several incidents of parents forgetting their children in locked cars.

The last recorded death occurred in late May in the coastal city of Ashdod, when a father forgot to drop off his one-year-old son at his preschool, unwittingly leaving him in the back of his parked car for three hours. The father returned to the car to discover his lifeless son.