Ten-year-old Ariel Or and his friend Harel Barzel were lost and frightened when they walked up to a gasoline station at the Dehaishe refugee camp, south of Bethlehem.
Dani Or, Ariel’s father, was sick with worry over the missing boys. His apprehension turned to cold fear when he learned where they were. Dehaishe is a center of violence, a stronghold of the intifada, where Israelis venture at their peril.
But the episode had an unexpectedly happy ending, which proved, at least to Dani Or, that the enemy can have a human side.
The odyssey began when the two boys unknowingly boarded the wrong bus in Jerusalem on Monday. When it reached the end of the line in the Talpiyot neighborhood, near Jerusalem’s southern limits, they started to walk home, unaware that home was on the other side of the city.
Night fell as they wandered for four hours through the unfamiliar hills. “Then we saw the lights of a gasoline station. As we approached, we heard people speaking Arabic,” Ariel Or later told the mass-circulation daily Yediot Achronot.
“We took off our yarmulkes, prayed ‘Shema Yisrael’ and spoke to the workers,” he recounted.
Speaking Hebrew, they told the two gas station attendants they were lost.
‘DROVE THERE LIKE CRAZY’
The two Arabs, Issa Ahmad Ja’afari, 31, and Adnan Ja’afari, 29, both residents of Dehaishe, invited the youngsters inside. They offered them food and drinks and let them telephone their families.
Dani Or said he could not believe his ears when an Arab voice told him his son was at Dehaishe. “I drove there like crazy, shaking all over. I know what Dehaishe means,” he said.
“I arrived at the gasoline station, and I found the children safe and sound,” Or told Yediot Achronot, which ran the story with big headlines.
Later the father wrote the two Arabs, thanking them for their “noble act.”
“With guys like you,” he wrote, “we are confident that peace will come, amen. We hope that this letter will make your life easier in these difficult days.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
