Murder-suicide suspected after boy hears gunfire, finds parents dead in Jerusalem home

Police said Friday they were investigating a suspected murder-suicide in Jerusalem after a 13-year-old boy found both his parents dead at their home.

The boy, the eldest of four, discovered his parents lying on the floor after he heard gunfire, the Walla news site reported. The outlet said the family was Haredi.

Paramedics pronounced the couple dead on the scene.

Officers found a gun near the father’s body, according to Hebrew-language media reports.

The preliminary suspicion by police is that the father, 38, shot his wife, 35, then killed himself with the weapon, for which he had reportedly held a permit since July 2023.

Police, in a statement, said that the circumstances of the couple’s deaths were “at this stage unclear.”

According to reports, there had been no previous complaints to police of domestic violence, and the family was not known to social services.

Last year, 23 women were killed in Israel because of their gender, according to the Israel Observatory on Femicide at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

According to the Observatory, 55 percent of the suspected killers were husbands or partners to their victims. In many other cases, the attackers were family members, such as brothers or sons.

The observatory counts so-called honor killings, matricides, and murders by a partner or family member as femicide. It does not include deaths from terrorism, accidents, or other unrelated issues.