Ambassador Leiter says he’s ‘full of hope’ for son seriously wounded in West Bank ramming attack

Israel’s Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter rushed back to Israel Thursday after his son was seriously wounded the previous day in a car-ramming attack in the West Bank, telling reporters that he was “full of hope” for his recovery and asserting that Palestinian violence in the territory was aimed at “uprooting the Jews from this land.”

Speaking at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center, where his son Neria remains hospitalized in serious condition, Leiter said he was “full of hope that he will come out of it this time and return to us safe and sound.”

Neria Leiter was seriously wounded Wednesday when Palestinian assailant Mahmoud Mohammad Sliman, 29, of the nearby village of Beit Ur al-Tahta, rammed him at the “Bell” checkpoint along Route 443 before being shot dead by troops. Leiter was taken unconscious to Shaare Zedek, where he underwent emergency brain surgery.

Although the doctors managed to stabilize Neria’s condition overnight, and “there is hope,” Leiter told reporters, “his life is still in danger.”

“This experience is different from the night I received a knock at the door,” he added, referring to his elder son, Maj. (res.) Moshe Yedidya Leiter, who was killed in battle alongside three other reservists in northern Gaza in November 2023.

“He died immediately, and there was no possibility to bring him to the hospital and allow Israeli doctors to save his life. And there wasn’t a possibility for us to gather around his bed, say prayers, and mobilize the people of Israel to pray for his recovery,” he said.

Leiter added that his eldest daughter, Sarah, went into labor two weeks early after arriving at the hospital to visit her wounded brother and was now also hospitalized at Shaare Zedek.

“When she arrived at her brother’s bedside yesterday, her water broke — two weeks before the due date,” he said. She gave birth overnight, and “now she is lying 40 meters from where he is in intensive care.”

According to the hospital, Neria’s condition is stable after doctors’ efforts overnight, but his life is still at risk.

Dr. Alon Schwartz, head of Shaare Zedek’s trauma unit, said Neria’s condition had stabilized after hours of surgery but remained serious, with his head injury posing the greatest danger.

“Neria continued to serve in the reserves after losing his older brother, Moshe Yedidya Leiter, of blessed memory, and has served hundreds of days in the reserves on various fronts since October 7. Palestinian terrorism seeks to uproot the people of Israel from their land. They choose death — we choose life,” Leiter wrote on X while flying to Israel.

At the hospital, Leiter broadened his remarks to violence across the West Bank, again portraying attacks by Palestinians as an effort to “uproot the Jews from this land” while dismissing violence by Israelis against Palestinians as “exceptions.”

He said he had learned of his son’s injury in New York shortly after giving an interview in which he was asked about violence in the West Bank.

“The violence there is by Palestinians who harm Jews, with the aim of uprooting the Jews from this land,” Leiter said. “If there are exceptions from the other side, they are exceptions — but the war that is taking place here is a war for the right of the Jews to live in this land.”

Palestinian terror attacks have been declining. The IDF recorded 57 attacks in 2025, killing 20 people, down from 258 attacks and 35 deaths in 2024, and 847 attacks and 41 deaths in 2023.

Meanwhile, settler violence has risen sharply in recent years, particularly since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, onslaught on southern Israel.

Attacks by settlers against Palestinians and Israeli security forces in the West Bank rose 27 percent in 2025 compared to 2024, according to IDF and Shin Bet data. In the first half of 2026, serious incidents of “nationalistic crime” by extremist Jewish settlers surged by 63% compared to the same period last year, according to Israeli security figures.

Leiter also targeted French President Emmanuel Macron, who criticized Israeli actions in the West Bank in an address to the UN and said Hamas had never been active there. Leiter accused Macron and other world leaders of misrepresenting Palestinian violence against Israelis.

“We need to tell him and the other leaders who are lying, as I believe the prime minister will do tonight,” Leiter said, referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s anticipated address to the UN General Assembly later Thursday, “that the goal is to uproot us from this place. That’s the bottom line.”

He added that the conflict “didn’t start on October 7,” but dated back to Israel’s establishment.

At the end of his remarks, Leiter pulled his son Noam close and embraced him as he praised Neria and his generation of reservists.

“Neria’s brothers and their contemporaries — this is the greatest generation that has risen up for the Jewish people,” he said. “There has never been such a generation, of young people who sacrifice their lives, fight on October 7, and do hundreds of days of reserve duty since then.”

“Neria didn’t have to do reserve duty either,” Leiter added. “They are all fighting together to defend this country.”