Jerusalem, July 16: Rioting ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem injured three people, including a municipal worker, Thursday morning, as they kept up protests against the arrest of a mother suspected of deliberately starving her three-year-old son.
The municipal worker, hit by stones in the face, head and shoulder, told police he was attacked when the rioters noticed his uniform.
The rioting broke out in the city’s religious neighbourhoods after the woman’s arrest. Members of the city’s ultra-Orthodox community, to which the woman belongs, protested her detention by setting fire to garbage containers and throwing stones.
Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat responded by ordering the closure of municipality offices in the ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods.
Doctors allege the woman, in her 30s, who is pregnant and a mother of four other children, suffers from the Muenchhausen Syndrome by Proxy, a disorder whereby a person deliberately causes or fakes the illness of someone, usually to get the attention of doctors.
The family have denied the accusation of child abuse and their spokesman said Thursday that the child was suffering from cancer, and his skeletal appearance was the effect of chemotherapy treatments.
Doctors however rejected this claim, saying the child’s health has improved and he has begun to put on weight, since he was taken into care.
The 3-year-old, whose weight had dropped to some seven kilograms, about half the average for boys his age, had been in and out of hospital for the past 18 months.
Doctors and social workers began suspecting Muenchausen Syndrome when a series of medical checks found nothing wrong
—–Agencies