‘THEY WERE NORMAL PEOPLE STANDING AT A BUS STOP ... THEN IT ALL GOT DESTROYED.’
BABY BORN PREMATURELY TO COUPLE IN WEST BANK SHOOTING IS LAID TO REST
In the moments before Amiad Yisrael, cloaked in a prayer shawl, was laid to rest at Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives cemetery on Wednesday night, some of the hundreds of people who had come to grieve the newborn’s death held umbrellas overhead to guard his little body from the rain.
Amiad, the son of a Canadian-Israeli man who has family ties to Montreal, died three days after his father and pregnant mother were shot at a bus stop near a settlement in the West Bank, which forced his mother to give birth to him prematurely.
Shira Ish-Ran was 30 weeks pregnant when she and her husband, Amichai, set out for the Israeli settlement of Ofra to visit her family on Sunday. They were catching a bus home when a vehicle drove by and gunmen opened fire.
Bystanders at the bus stop tried to scatter, Amichai among them, until the 23-year-old rabbinical student looked back and saw his wife lying prone on the ground. Instinctively he dove back to shield her from the bullets. He was shot three times in the leg. Shira, a 21-year-old aspiring teacher, was hit in the back.
The young couple, newlyweds as of last February, survived the attack and continue to recover from their injuries, as do five other people who were wounded.
They weren’t well enough to leave hospital for their baby’s funeral. Instead they said goodbye to Amiad on Wednesday, a couple of hours before he passed away.
“They were normal people standing at a bus stop. Brand new, young couple, have their own little place, they’re renting — everything you would think of for a nice, normal, young family to be,” Jordan Charness, a Montreal lawyer who is Amichai IshRan’s uncle, said on Friday.
“And then it all got destroyed by this terrorist.”
Hours after Amiad died, Israeli forces killed one of the suspects in the shooting, a 29-year-old Palestinian named Salah Barghouti, as he attempted to escape arrest. The militant Hamas group that rules the Gaza Strip said Barghouti was one of its members, but stopped short of claiming responsibility for the attack.
After Amichai and Shira decided their boy would be called Amiad, his name was revealed to relatives and other mourners at his funeral. Refael Ish-Ran, Amiad’s grandfather, said in a tearful eulogy that the baby had “managed to unite the nation of Israel” like few other people.
“You brought so much light,” Refael said, according to the Times of Israel newspaper. “And with all the light that you brought, we will extinguish their darkness.”
Amichai, who is a dual Canadian-Israeli citizen and travels to Montreal to see his extended family every year, underwent surgery for his injuries and is expecting to be discharged from hospital this weekend, Charness said. Shira, he said, was in a coma for two days but is now out of intensive care.
Coincidentally, Amichai Ish-Ran’s brother, a member of the Israeli army, saw the shooting unfold live via surveillance footage on Sunday and immediately sent emergency personnel to the scene.
“He didn’t know it was his brother, because it’s not that detailed a camera,” Charness said. He added that Amichai’s brother is getting married in Israel next month.
“They’re busy planning a wedding in the midst of a tragedy,” Charness said. “It’s incomprehensible."
Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have condemned the shooting and paid tribute to its youngest victim. After news of Amiad’s death was confirmed, Trudeau said in a tweet on Thursday that, “This heinous terrorist violence targeting civilians is completely inexcusable. May the boy’s memory be a blessing, and may the injured recover.”
Charness said it was nice to see the Canadian government denounce the attack and show support for its victims, but he couldn’t shake a feeling of helplessness as he sat in his office in Montreal on Friday. He can speak to his family in Israel from afar, but he won’t get to see them for another two weeks, when he plans to fly there for his nephew’s wedding.
That trip will come several months after he picked up the phone to answer a call from Amichai and Shira, who couldn’t wait to tell him they were going to have a child.
“They were so thrilled,” Charness said.