JERUSALEM (JTA) — The Israeli teen injured in a Gaza rocket attack on a school bus has died a day after a weeklong cease-fire between Israel and Gaza terror groups was disrupted.
Israel Channel 2 reported Sunday evening that Daniel Viflic, 16, was declared dead at Beersheba’s Soroka Hospital, 10 days after arriving there with severe head trauma after a rocket fired from Gaza slammed into his school bus traveling outside of Kibbutz Sa’ad in southern Israel near the Gaza border. The bus driver, the only other occupant of the bus at the time of the attack, also was injured.
Viflic had been in a deep coma with no brain activity for at least a week.
Early Saturday, Israeli airstrikes hit two terrorist bases near Gaza City in retaliation for rocket fire on two southern Israeli cities, disrupting the unofficial cease-fire. The Israeli attack came hours after two long-range rockets were fired from Gaza on Ashdod and Ashkelon.
The cease-fire had started a few days after the school bus bombing following Israeli retaliatory strikes for weeks of increased rocket attacks by Gaza terrorist groups that had hit Israel, and after a weekend in which 150 rockets from Gaza struck southern Israel, including the rocket that hit Viflic. Nineteen Palestinians were killed in Israeli retaliatory strikes.
