But there are still nights, especially following terrorist attacks in Israel, when the nightmares return and Yaniv asks to sleep with his parents, says his mother, Tova Amousha.
“The physical recovery was easy, but the emotional recovery has been very hard.”
But this summer, a day camp funded by the United Jewish Communities’ Israel Emergency Campaign helped Yaniv’s emotional recovery.
“It was something else,” Amousha says of the three-week day camp program, which ended in July. “Every day, he came home with a different story. He had such a good time. They went to the pool, played games; he had a great time.”
Yaniv was playing soccer in a field adjacent to Hadera’s central bus station on May 25, 2001, when a car pulled alongside a public bus and blew up. The two terrorists inside the car were killed and 45 people were wounded in the attack. The force of the blast destroyed a wall surrounding the soccer field, and Yaniv was injured in the chin and chest by flying stones.
While the physical injuries healed, the emotional ones did not.
“He internalized everything, he didn’t want to talk about it,” Tova Amousha says.