Ya’ir Hirsch, who was shot in a terrorist ambush attack on Tuesday night near Shilo, shows no weakness, though he faces a long period of recovery and rehabilitation. “I will yet return to be a regiment commander in the reserves,” he told Arutz-7’s Hebrew newsmagazine.
Hirsch, the manager of the Achiyah Farm – producer of organic olive oil based on a vision of Land of Israel produce and Jewish labor – was on his way home from work on Tuesday night when he was ambushed: “I left the plant in the Shilo industrial zone and was driving along the Shilo-Jordan Valley road. Shortly after I passed Shvut Rachel, suddenly bullets were being fired at me.”
“My first instinct was to stop the car,” Hirsch said, “but then I realized that I had better get out of there. I continued driving, and realized that I had been hit in my left hand. I called my wife and told her I had been hurt. I felt that I was losing a lot of blood and was about to lose consciousness, but I continued driving another kilometer, up to the little community of Kidah.”
Emergency medics treated Hirsch on the scene and called a helicopter to evacuate him. In the end, however, he was taken by ambulance, while fully conscious, to Jerusalem’s Ein Karem Hadassah Hospital.
Hirsch said he saw the terrorists firing at him from only 4-5 meters from the road. “If I had remained there, I would have been fired upon massively,” he recounted. “I had a great miracle.”
“I know that I have a long rehabilitation period ahead of me,” he said, “but I don’t plan to give in. I will yet return to being a reserves regiment commander.”
Sources in the Binyamin region, where the attack occurred, blame the “policy of security wantonness” for the attack. The road, dotted with Jewish communities of various sizes, is permitted only for Jewish travel – though the army has allowed PA Arabs to travel there for the purpose of harvesting their olives. “It is totally irresponsible to allow the Arabs to reach the outskirts of our towns with the excuse of harvesting olives,” sources say, “and then they take advantage to perpetrate attacks. This is the fourth such attack this year.”
In the worst of these roadside shootings, Moshe Avitan, father of five daughters, was left with only shadow vision and no sense of taste or smell.