Police said Friday they were investigating a suspected murder-suicide in Jerusalem after a 13-year-old boy found both his parents dead at their home.
The boy, the eldest of four, discovered his parents lying on the floor after he heard gunfire, the Walla news site reported. The outlet said the family was Haredi.
Paramedics pronounced the couple dead on the scene.
Officers found a gun near the father’s body, according to Hebrew-language media reports.
The preliminary suspicion by police is that the father, 38, shot his wife, 35, then killed himself with the weapon, for which he had reportedly held a permit since July 2023.
Police, in a statement, said that the circumstances of the couple’s deaths were “at this stage unclear.”
According to reports, there had been no previous complaints to police of domestic violence, and the family was not known to social services.
Last year, 23 women were killed in Israel because of their gender, according to the Israel Observatory on Femicide at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
According to the Observatory, 55 percent of the suspected killers were husbands or partners to their victims. In many other cases, the attackers were family members, such as brothers or sons.
The observatory counts so-called honor killings, matricides, and murders by a partner or family member as femicide. It does not include deaths from terrorism, accidents, or other unrelated issues.
It’s not (only) about you.
Supporting The Times of Israel isn’t a transaction for an online service, like subscribing to Netflix. The ToI Community is for people like you who care about a common good: ensuring that balanced, responsible coverage of Israel continues to be available to millions across the world, for free.
Sure, we’ll remove all ads from your page and you’ll unlock access to some excellent Community-only content. But your support gives you something more profound than that: the pride of joining something that really matters.
Join the Times of Israel Community
Join our Community
Already a member? Sign in to stop seeing this
You’re a dedicated reader
We’re really pleased that you’ve read X Times of Israel articles in the past month.
That’s why we started the Times of Israel – to provide discerning readers like you with must-read coverage of Israel and the Jewish world.
So now we have a request. Unlike other news outlets, we haven’t put up a paywall. But as the journalism we do is costly, we invite readers for whom The Times of Israel has become important to help support our work by joining The Times of Israel Community.
For as little as $6 a month you can help support our quality journalism while enjoying The Times of Israel AD-FREE, as well as accessing exclusive content available only to Times of Israel Community members.
Thank you,
David Horovitz, Founding Editor of The Times of Israel
Join Our Community
Join Our Community
Already a member? Sign in to stop seeing this
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;
n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,’script’,
‘https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
fbq(‘init’, ‘272776440645465’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘PageView’);
