A mother who was speaking on the phone with her son who was at the Beer Sheva Central Bus Station when a terror attack occurred in 2015 was recognized by the Defense Ministry as a terror victim, according to a Walla! report on Sunday.
As the mother was speaking to her son from her home, they began to hear gunshots and shouts in the background. According to attorney Yoav Almagor, who represented the mother, the phone connection between the mother and son wasn't cut off as the son ran to find a hiding place, and while fleeing, his leg was hit by a bullet. As he fell, his phone dropped from his hand but before losing consciousness, the soldier managed to retrieve the phone and tell his mother that he had been wounded and was about to die.
The mother - on the other end of the line - suffered from great emotional distress from hearing the incident and her son's declaration. One of the security forces who arrived at the scene picked up the phone from the ground and hearing that the mother was on the other end of the line, told her that her son had been evacuated for treatment to Soroka hospital.
The son, whose thigh bone had been shattered and had a bullet lodged in his leg, underwent emergency surgery. He currently still suffers from severe disability and pain and gets around with a wheelchair. He himself has been recognized as a disabled IDF veteran by the Defense Ministry in a separate process.
Meanwhile, the soldier's mother developed post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of the incident. According to Almagor, the courts have dismissed quite a few similar claims in the past from post-trauma victims who weren't physically present at the attack despite the emotional trauma they suffered. Almagor said that the law states that a direct and actual connection between the terror incident and the emotional trauma must be proven.
However, the Defense Ministry accepted the mother's request in a rare decision since she heard the incident occur in "real time" over the phone - "as if she was physically present at the site itself."
The Defense Ministry instructed the woman's HMO to provide her with all the necessary treatments for the trauma and in the near future will determine the level of her disability and the allowance she will receive from the Ministry.