A seven-year-old child was hurt Tuesday afternoon by Arabs hurling rocks at the car in which she was a passenger while riding near the Maccabim-Reut junction on Route 443, between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The incident occurred next to the Arab village of Beit Sira.
Sources said the girl's father, an emergency medical technician (EMT), kept driving until he reached a nearby gas station, where Magen David Adom (MDA) and Hatzoloh emergency medics arrived and immediately treated the little girl, who was lightly injured in the face. She did not require hospitalization, and it was not clear whether she was hit by flying glass or by a rock.
IDF soldiers searched the area for the attackers but have not yet found them. Beit Sira is a Palestinian Authority town located 22 kilometers west of Ramallah, with a population of approximately 2,750.
The Maccabim-Re'ut junction is located near two communities that merged together with Modi'in in 2003 to form a city in the center of the country that numbers more than 70,000 residents.
The 28-kilometer Route 443 east-west highway, also known as the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road via Modi'in, begins from the city of Lod and stretches to the Jerusalem suburb of Giv'at Ze'ev, where it feeds into the Begin Expressway around the capital. The four-lane divided highway is also the only direct access route to the capital for thousands of residents of the Binyamin region.