JERUSALEM - An Israeli couple going on a European vacation remembered to take their duty-free purchases and their 18 suitcases, but forgot their 3-year-old daughter at the airport, police said Monday.

The couple and their five children were late for a charter flight to Paris Sunday and made a mad dash to the gate. In the confusion, their daughter got lost.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said a policeman found her wandering in the duty-free area at Ben-Gurion airport, Israel's bustling main international air portal. He said the officer alerted airline staff, but the flight had already taken off.

The incident happened on what Israeli media said was one of the busiest days of the year at the Israeli airport, with thousands of people leaving for summer vacations abroad. The Haaretz newspaper reported that 2.6 million passengers are expected to pass through the airport in July and August, an increase of 12 percent compared to the same period last year.

Israeli media said the parents of the forgotten girl were an ultra-Orthodox Jewish couple but did not give their names.

Rosenfeld said the parents were unaware they had boarded the aircraft with only four children instead of five until they were informed by cabin staff after 40 minutes in the air.

The child, accompanied by an airline staffer, took the next flight to Paris, where she was safely reunited with her parents.

Running the story on its front page Monday, the Yediot Ahronot daily quoted an unnamed police officer as saying, "A very cute little girl grabbed my leg and asked 'where are my parents, where are my brothers?'"

A female police officer identified only by her last name, Ben-Eden, checked records for the girl's family. "I saw her parents and brothers were on a plane that was set to take off in three minutes," she told the paper.

Ben Eden picked up the girl and rushed to the gate for the flight to Paris. "I ran quickly because I knew that every minute mattered. At the same time, the police tried to contact the flight attendants to get them to stop the plane. When I reached the gate, the plane was no longer there."

Rosenfeld said police would question the couple when they return from vacation, on suspicion of parental negligence.

Haaretz quoted the girl's grandmother, who took the family to the airport, as saying, "We're in shock. They're very responsible and organized, top-notch people. Apparently one relied on the other, and this is what happened."

The paper recounted that several days ago, an 8-year-old boy traveling alone boarded a flight to Brussels instead of Munich, and two weeks before that, a 10-year-old boy was left behind when the rest of his group flew to Copenhagen.

Israeli media often play up stories about mistreated children. Recent prominent reports have concerned toddlers left in locked cars or buses on hot days or abused by caretakers. On Monday, Channel 2 TV devoted a segment of its early evening newscast to an infant who was severely burned when a pot of boiling soup fell on him at his home.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26006350/

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No request is too extreme
When you wish upon a star
As dreamers do...

The epilogue to Day One...

Alas, the time that I spent away was so very short, and not nearly filled with enough minutes to document the entire holiday. One thing that I can say for sure is that in the Land of Hurry up and Wait there was a great deal of hurrying up and waiting for things to happen, and I suppose that this is the way it is and I can do nothing else...

Being that time was mostly occupied with the hurrying and wait and I did not have enough time to fill in the details of days two, three and four, I will just give some generalities on the observations that I made during all these days. The one thing that stood out far above the rest was those who were on power vacation with their children who were small enough to be in strollers. These folks are some of the rudest people I have even met, and heaven forbid if one would happen to block their mad dash for even a millisecond. I just do not understand why they feel the need to see everything in such a short time when their children will never have a memory of the whole ordeal, which is probably for the best anyhow...

Number two generalization for the holiday would be that some of those who drive rental mobility devices usually are far less courteous than those who actually own their mobility devices. Though there are times when I wonder if some of t survive a he rental nobility device people do so just to get through the lines quicker or are too lazy and/or out of shape to survive I day when some degree of physical fitness is required. Yep, I have wonder about such things as I was hit in the ankle once and had numerous close calls with the rental crowd...

It is good to be queued with the common rabble at times, but it is just as good to use the power of one's position to speed through lines at times. In the Land of Hurry up and Wait, sometimes the wait is not worth the time spent experiencing the thing that is being waited for. Though I suppose that if I had rented a mobility device, the queue time would have been greatly reduced in regards to both cases...

It was somewhat unusual to be so near so many wild animals who are dependant upon the vacationers to provide them with food. In my next of the woods, it is extremely rare to be within three or four inches of non-domesticated birds, but it is possible there. And the same holds true of the rabbits and the squirrels for in my neck o' the woods such creatures are for eatin' and for the most part these creatures do not appreciate being consumed by other creatures so they tend to stay far from those who will devour them...

And here I sit on my return flight, back I go to my humble abode. At least the scenery outside the window is different than the flight down. For the most part on the flight south, the clouds were just tiny cotton balls set against an earthly background. But on the return flight from this window, the world appears to be a winter wonderland; the landscape is entirely white with a few gray mountains reaching for the heavens. The Earth as I knew it is gone, and I am wondering if this is what the planet looked like during the last Ice Age, I wonder if my ancestors are walking the plains of snow chasing a mammoth, I wonder if life ten thousand years gone passed has been resurrected down below my window, I wonder if the world that I knew five day before has been swallowed by my visions of the past. I wonder as I sit here flying toward my home so far away...

This is the Word of the AntiCrust...

Praise be ye who Read the Word for ye are Blessed amongst humans...