JERUSALEM (JTA) — The mother of 4-year-old terror victim Adele Biton gave birth to a baby girl on the birthday of her late daughter.
Adele was severely injured in a Palestinian rock attack in the West Bank in 2013 and died two years later. She never regained consciousness.
“It’s not a matter of filling a void,” Adva Biton told Israel’s Channel 12. “Every child is a whole world, we have other lovely children in the house. We have two other sons who were born — one in the period when Adele was still alive and one was born after her death — but Adele has no substitute, it does not work that way.”
The girl born Sunday is the family’s seventh child.
Adva Biton was driving her three young daughters near the near the Ariel settlement on March 14, 2013, when her car swerved after being hit by rocks thrown by two Palestinian teens and struck a truck. The family had been driving from their home in the West Bank settlement of Yakir to central Israel.
Adele, then 2, suffered a serious head wound and later died of complications from pneumonia. Her sisters, aged 4 and 5, were moderately wounded.
Five Palestinians, who were 16 or 17 at the time of the incident, were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years in jail. The military court also ordered them to pay several thousand dollars in damages to the Biton family.
The birth of a daughter “brings a kind of comfort, a kind of healing, a kind of emotional strength and connection to the great good that is lavished on us, but to say that it heals, that it is in place of her, really not,” Adele Biton said.
“Just as we live with our loss 24/7, we are choosing life and continue to bring life into the world.”