Jerusalem (AFP) – Israel’s ambassador to the United States said Thursday that his soldier son was fighting for his life after a Palestinian attacker rammed his car into him at a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank. Ambassador Yechiel Leiter also lashed out at French President Emmanuel Macron for focusing on settler violence in his address to the UN General Assembly this week.
Speaking to reporters outside a hospital in Jerusalem, Leiter recounted rushing home Wednesday after an attacker ran down his reservist son Neria, who was searching vehicles at a checkpoint near an Israeli settlement. Neria Leiter, 39, underwent a “complex brain surgery” overnight that lasted several hours, according to the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. Ambassador Leiter, who had been due to attend Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address Thursday at the United Nations, said the operation raised his hopes. “They succeeded in stabilising his condition, but his life is still in danger,” Leiter told reporters outside the medical facility.
He strongly criticised Macron, who in his UN address on Tuesday voiced alarm about Israeli actions in the West Bank. Leiter said that Macron was motivated “out of ignorance or malice or wickedness” in saying that “Hamas has never harmed Jews in Judea and Samaria”, using the biblical name for the West Bank. On Sunday, a Palestinian assailant in the West Bank killed a settler, Netanel Shukrun, who also held French citizenship.
“It must be said to him, and to the other leaders who stand in that place and lie — and I assume that today, in a few hours, the prime minister will say exactly these things — that the purpose of the attack on Netanel Shukron and on my son Neria yesterday is to uproot us from this place,” Leiter said. Israeli settlements are illegal under international law and recent months have seen a spike in attacks and theft by extremist settlers against Palestinians. The United Nations said there were about six settler-related violent incidents against Palestinians or their property daily through mid-2026 in the territory.
Leiter, a religious Jew who had eight children, was born in the United States before immigrating to Israel and moving to a settlement in the West Bank. Another of his sons died in combat in Gaza in November 2023. Leiter has frequently criticised France. Last year, speaking after a gunman killed two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, he accused France of fuelling anti-Jewish sentiment through plans to recognise a Palestinian state.
© 2024 AFP
