A pregnant woman from Betar Ilit in Judea driving home with three young children was the target of an Arab rock attack on Thursday, in an incident that set off the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) she has been dealing with since surviving a terrorist attack as a 15-year-old.
The woman, Ilana Cohen, was driving through the Gush Etzion tunnels south of Jerusalem on her way home when her car was hit by a rock thrown from above.
Her mother Riva Schertzman told Arutz Sheva about the attack, noting, "fortunately, the front window didn't break and she didn't see any dents. She just felt the impact and saw the rock fly towards the window."
While rock attacks on Jewish cars have become a tragically common occurrence in Israel, the incident was particularly serious given Cohen's PTSD.
At the young age of 15 as she was coming home from school on a bus in Jerusalem's northeastern French Hill neighborhood, an Arab terrorist opened fire on the bus, murdering her best friend next to her.
"After the horrendous incident as a kid, the State of Israel avoided all responsibility to help my daughter," charged Schertzman. "I was relatively new to Israel and not sure what to do so I took her for a few sessions with therapists I knew."
Aside from the emotional damage, Cohen still suffers from a bullet fragment that was lodged in her cheek, which was only recently discovered in a CT scan.
Schertzman said that when her daughter was in hospital, "they failed to inform me that there was still metal in my daughter's cheek. They said it was glass that would fall out by itself, but she continued to complain to doctors about her chronic face pain. This year, an ENT gave her the scan which revealed the leftover bullet fragment from the attack."