An Israeli man who was shot in the neck by a stray bullet on Monday night walked away from the incident with only minor injuries to show for the experience.
The man, identified by Channel 12 as Ma’alot-Tarshiha resident Amiram Dvir, was walking around Monfort Lake, in the northern city when a stray bullet lodged itself in the back of his neck.
The 5.6 caliber bullet is believed to have been fired into the air in the nearby town of Kisra-Sumei, Ynet reported.
Despite the bullet hitting Dvir squarely in the back of the neck, he told Channel 12 on Tuesday that he did not immediately understand what had occurred.
“I was taking a walk around the lake and while walking, I felt a strong blow to my neck,” he recounted. “I touched it and thought maybe it was a butterfly that had hit me, and I felt there was something stuck there. I tried unsuccessfully to get it out until it started to burn.”
At that point, he said, he called out to some people who had been walking ahead of him, and they came over and tried to help him as well, also without success.
“I called my wife and asked her to check with Magen David Adom if they could remove it from my neck,” he continued, recalling that after hearing gunshots in the distance, he decided to “call the police, just to be on the safe side.”
Dvir said he continued to walk while on the phone with the police, and had reached his car when the operator told him to stop moving, and instead dispatched police vehicles and ambulances to the scene.
He was then taken to the Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya, where concerned doctors instructed him to stop moving, as they feared the bullet was lodged in a major artery or the spinal cord, and that accidentally jolting it out of place could spell disaster.
“By a great miracle they were able to remove the bullet,” Dvir told Channel 12. “As soon as they showed it to me, I just couldn’t believe it. It’s just a huge miracle that it ended like this. It could have ended differently, whether with paralysis for life or immediate death.”
In response to the incident, the Ma’alot-Tarshiha municipality said in a statement that police have been monitoring the area since the incident, and stressed that there is no cause for the public to be concerned, as “the incident is under control and being investigated by police and security forces.”
