Mother, two children killed in car crash

A mother and two of her children were killed in a car accident in the north of the country on Monday, and another three people were badly injured.

The women, 36, and two children, a boy aged nine and a girl aged six, died when the car they were in slammed head-on into a minibus near Kibbutz El Rom in the Golan Heights. The father of the family, 40, who was in critical condition, and another daughter, three, who was seriously injured, were evacuated by helicopter to Rambam Medical Center in Haifa.

Doctors were fighting to save the father who had multiple injuries, Channel 2 reported.

Although the cause of the crash was still under investigation, some eye-witnesses said a horse in the road had caused both vehicles to swerve from their lanes and into each other’s paths.

Firefighting crews that arrived at the scene extricated the injured and dead from the private car, which was mangled out of shape by the force of the impact.

According to the report, Colonel Ghassan Alian, commander of the IDF’s Golani Brigade, was the first on the scene and helped in the efforts to free the crash victims from the vehicles.

The minibus driver, 63, who was lightly-to-moderately injured, was also evacuated by ambulance from the crash site.

The crash caused a closure of Route 98 in both directions.

Magen David Adom ambulance medic Yeroham Kantman described the attempts to help the crash victims.

“It was a very serious accident,” he said. “The situation was complicated because the injured people were trapped.
We administered first aid to the injured and tried to resuscitate them but we had to declare the mother and one of her children dead.”

“The six year old daughter was treated by an IDF medical unit but after prolonged resuscitation efforts they declared her dead,” he explained.