Mother and three children die in fatal crash with bus in northern Israel

• Published date: 30 September 2021
• Author: HADAS LABRISCH
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The four passengers of the private vehicle were a 35-year-old woman, her 15-and-12-year-old sons and five-year-old daughter.

The fifth fatality was a man who was trapped by the overturned bus and suffered multi-organ crush injuries.

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The bus was carrying a group of children in the Bnei Akiva youth movement, 17 of whom are from the northern town of Mevo Dotan.

According to reports, the bus initially hit the van, and then hit the car. It then flipped over at least three times, finally landing on its side, as was seen in video footage circulating on social media.

Both the van and the car were crushed in the collision. The car passengers were trapped, unconscious, until Fire and Rescue Services teams managed to extricate them from the vehicle. Once they were evacuated from the car, Magen David Adom (MDA) paramedics were forced to declare all four family members dead.

In the overturned bus, most of the passengers were able to get out of the bus safely and suffered only light or moderate injuries, but the bus driver, 76-year-old Asher Basson from Kiryat Yam, died in the accident.

"The heart breaks in light of the images from the difficult crash in the Upper Galilee," tweeted Prime Minister Naftali Bennett Wednesday evening, after he landed back in Israel from his visit to the United States. "The people of Israel are praying for the recovery of the victims. I ask the Israeli public to exercise extra caution to drive safely and carefully."

"My son is mostly scared," a mother of one of the children on the bus told N12. "He sustained a few bumps from the flip. He is on the way to the hospital in Nahariya."

The youth were returning home from a Sukkot trip with a Bnei Akiva group in Harish, a small town near the site of the accident. Most of the 35 children on the bus suffered light or moderate injuries.

"We felt that the bus accelerated for an unknown reason, and then we rolled over three or four times," a Bnei Akiva counselor recounted.

"He said he was talking to a friend and suddenly there was a hard collision and he said the bus spun around and they fell," the mother continued, relaying the dramatic moments of the crash. "Kids began crying and screaming. The bus was mostly children."

Three Fire and Rescue teams from the Central Galilee District, along with three additional teams that were called in to help, extricated and...