The Lod District Court recently rejected an appeal by an Israeli lawyer against a ruling requiring a mother to return her 6-year-old son to his father in Italy. The court found that she had wrongfully brought the child to Israel without the father’s consent.
The former couple met in 2019 while the man, an Italian citizen, was visiting Israel as a tourist. After the woman became pregnant, they decided to settle in Israel, where their son was born in 2020. In December 2024, the family moved to Italy. In January, however, the mother returned to Israel alone with the child.
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In a lawsuit filed in May with the Family Court, the father demanded that his son be returned to Italy under the Hague Convention Law. The mother argued that she had been forced to flee to Israel after suffering severe abuse by her partner. She said that on Christmas Eve he brutally attacked her and shoved her with such force that her head struck a wall, breaking her teeth and causing cuts. According to her account, she lost consciousness and was taken by ambulance to a hospital.
The father gave a sharply different version of events. He said the woman had fallen because she was intoxicated and claimed the damage to her teeth resulted from gum disease and chronic neglect, not violence on his part.
Last month, the Family Court accepted the father’s lawsuit and ordered the child returned to Italy. Addressing the abuse allegation, the court said the mother had raised it “weakly and without any supporting evidence” and found that returning the child to his father would not expose him to danger.
In her appeal to the District Court, the mother argued that the ruling condemned her son to live in “an environment saturated with severe, cruel and ongoing physical violence.” She again described the Christmas Eve incident and said police had been called to the home before she was taken to the hospital. She argued that she had fled to Israel with her son “to save their lives.”
The court accepted the father’s account, in which he again denied committing any violence, upheld the Family Court’s decision and ordered the mother to return the child to Italy. The father was ordered to finance the mother and child’s stay in Italy through the end of the calendar year and to deposit child support payments totaling 2,000 euros.
“This is a clear case of abduction, and there is no alternative but to return the minor to Italy,” the ruling said. “If the appellant wishes to immigrate back to Israel with the minor, she must apply to the competent court in Italy. That is the path she should have taken from the outset.
“Even fleeing violence by a partner, according to the appellant’s version, does not justify the abduction of a minor. She should have approached the competent authorities in Italy to protect her safety rather than take the law into her own hands and sever the minor from his father.”
The mother’s appeal was dismissed, and she was ordered to pay 20,000 shekels in legal costs. That sum will be added to the 30,000 shekels in costs imposed by the Family Court.